6 Reasons to Get a Separate Phone Number for Your Business

6 Reasons Why Maintaining a Separate Work Phone Number Is Important

Keep Your Personal Communications Personal

As an entrepreneur, you are often on call, running your business 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you don’t separate business calls from personal ones, you run the risk of burnout. As you cannot distinguish whether it is a personal call or business, in order not to miss a client you will probably try to answer every single call, including spam calls, even if you are out of business hours, off sick, or on annual leave. By simply setting up a separate phone number for business calls, you can separate business and personal life by setting up working hours, transferring calls to voicemail, and forwarding calls to certain specialists. Taking this approach makes it easier to maintain a work-life balance.

Encourage Your Potential Clients to Trust Your Business

Customers expect a certain level of professionalism and having a separate phone number can make your business look more professional and create a better first impression. When customers are searching for a new company, if they find that your number is a personal line, they may think you are unestablished and less capable than a business that has a professional business line. Once you get a separate business phone number, you can stop listing your personal one anywhere customers may look to contact you. Not only will this create a better first impression, but it also ensures that clients and partners can easily find your contact information. You can also choose a business number or a toll-free number that is easy to remember and makes it much easier for your clients to recognize you, creating a better perception of your brand and increase trust in your business.

Another benefit of setting up a separate business phone line is that you can use your company name when answering business calls and set up personalized business greetings. These added features make you appear more professional and, in turn, can improve customer’s trust and loyalty.

Improve Your Professional Image

Having the same line for personal and business means that you can answer a business call at inappropriate times. For example, if you answer a business call while hanging out in a bar with friends or playing with your children. If you seem distracted and unprofessional, it can influence the perception of your brand. Plus, if clients or partners call you at the wrong moment, you most likely won’t be able to respond and communicate properly, which can reflect poorly on the business image and end up costing you clients. Having a separate business number can help you avoid such clumsy situations. It is easy to identify incoming business calls, giving you the time to find a more appropriate place and time to talk and show respect to a calling person.

Business phone numbers enable you to set a clear working time frame when you can answer the calls accurately and professionally. Anyone who calls you outside working hours can receive a professional voice message like “Hello, you’ve contacted the right company, but we cannot answer you now. Our office is closed at night, so please contact us tomorrow or leave a message, we will call you back as soon as possible”.

Apply All Business Features

Thanks to developing technologies, business phone lines provide a variety of additional services than personal ones. Using VoIP systems, you can apply tons of helpful features to your business phone number. For example, depending on the VoIP provider, you can set the following business call options to your existing phone:

• call forwarding and call transferring;
• voicemail;
• call tracking and analytics;
• business text messengers;
• auto-receptionists;
• call queues;
• customized voicemail greetings;
• call conferences;
• CRM integration etc.

With these VoIP system’s features, you can get a powerful set of tools for your business, track and analyze your customers’ interactions. However, not all vendors provide all the above options, so you should determine the features you need in your business phone system and choose the right VoIP system provider.

Screen Incoming Calls

Nobody wants to receive robocalls and spam calls; however, sometimes unwanted callers trick you into answering the phone by using a local number or private number and make you believe that you are receiving a call from someone important. With some VoIP system providers, you can set up a call screening option to your virtual business number. Call screening automatically identifies a caller and determines the best way to answer. Thanks to this feature, you are one step ahead of the spam callers and know if answering the call is worthwhile. If it is not, it gives you the option to hang up or transfer it to your voicemail. If the call is determined as a spam call in some VoIP systems, you can set it to hang up automatically. This feature can help you to save a lot of work time and focus on important tasks and business calls.

Obtain the Ability to Work from Anywhere

Cloud phone systems provide you geographic independence and ensure that you are able to conduct business regardless of your current location - the call can be immediately transferred to your smartphone, and the voice message can be sent as a text message wherever you are. Plus, you don’t need to change your number even if you are going to another region or country, you just need a reliable VoIP system to set the business number to your smartphone that will always be with you. This means that is that your customers won’t even notice if you move your office to a new location or set up a remote team as your virtual number will stay the same. It is also beneficial for businesses who have to travel frequently for work as regardless of where you are in the world, you can still work and receive business calls just as normal as you would at home or your office.

Summing Up

Using personal numbers for business can make it hard to balance your personal life as it makes it impossible to stop thinking of work even at night or on vacation. Setting up a separate business phone is an affordable solution suitable for small and large businesses to help you keep a work-life balance and protect your personal information. Whether you are a small business owner or a large company, a separate business phone number will increase credibility to your company and enhance your company’s brand name.

A separate business phone line also gives businesses more flexibility, thanks to a virtual phone system, even if your business changes the location, your customers will be able to contact you through the same phone number. Whenever you have an opportunity to optimize your business, you should always make the most of it, for example, by using a professional business number.