Five Reasons to Stop Using Your Mobile Personal Line for Business

With email and mobile phones, you might be thinking who needs business phones anymore; however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While, initially, you may be able to get by with using your personal phone number for work, as it is easy, convenient, and affordable, it can end up costing you in the long run.

Here are five reasons why you should think twice about using your personal line for business.

It Doesn’t Appear Professional

Your business may be a cutting-edge organization with quality employees; however, with one simple phone call, the professional perception could be shattered. There are a number of perceived risks that come when employees use their personal phones for business, such as they may not answer out of business hours, resulting in missed calls and missed opportunities. Alternatively, if they do answer, they may answer the call as they would do a personal call either casually or with a lot of background noise, appearing unprofessional.

Simple Fix: Modern business VoIP systems allow you to set business hours, meaning that any customer will be greeted with a professional voicemail message when your employees are out of the office. Plus, any business call will come through either the employee’s computer or mobile app, meaning it is clearly recognizable as a business call. Therefore, the employee knows to answer with their professional hat on and move to a quieter area if needed.

Lack of Access to Important Customer and Company Data

If an employee uses their personal phone number to conduct business with clients, important client information will automatically go through their personal phone line. Not only does this have potential privacy issues, but it means that you don’t have access to important customer contact information such as call logs, text messages, voicemails, and you cannot reconduct quality control or track important business metrics such as call volume, call length, and call quality. Quality control and tracking metrics are a vital part of any successful business, it helps you to forecast, allocate resources and most importantly keep your customers satisfied.

Simple Fix:

With all the phone lines controlled from one central web platform, you will have easy access to all your customer data. The easy-to-use web app and mobile app also give you the ability to add and remove a virtual phone number instantly, so if an employee chooses to leave the company, you can easily deactivate their phone number. Deactivating your employees’ numbers once they leave the business ensures that they no longer have access to private customer information, saving the company from facing any privacy issues and keeping your customer data safe.

Disruption to Work-Life Balance

While as a business owner, it is important that you are always available to your clients, it is also important to have a work-life balance. For this reason, your personal and business number should be separate. If you are using your personal number for your work, it can become impossible to switch off; as much as you may try to avoid it, you will ultimately end up just taking that quick call on the weekend or while you are on holiday. While it may not feel like a big deal initially, it can lead to burnout in the long run.

Simple Fix:

With separate business phone numbers in a virtual phone system, employees can set boundaries. VoIP systems have call routing, enabling employees to direct their calls to an available colleague or professional voicemail when they are on the weekend, holidays, out of the office, or off work sick.

It’s Hard to Scale

A personal phone number may seem ok when your business is small, but it can become complicated as you grow your business. You may hire an assistant, a salesperson, or a customer service agent and must give them access to your personal number to deal with customers. Using a personal phone number for business means that anyone who needs access to the number has access to all your personal calls and may answer a private phone call or dial a wrong number by mistake.

Simple Fix:

VoIP systems are designed to support SMBs growth; as you scale, you have access to as many new numbers you need, meaning you can easily set up extensions for any new employees you have onboard or open separate channels of communication for different campaigns. Plus, call forwarding, call screening, and call routing are simple to activate, meaning you have control over the calls that are coming in and who they are being directed to.

It Lacks Efficiency and Impacts the Customer Experience

Businesses best operate when they are efficient and using a personal phone line for business impacts this. Personal phone lines lack features designed to optimize productivity such as call forwarding and call waiting, plus they are not designed to be integrated with other important business software that improves the customer experience, such as CRMs and project management tools.

Simple Fix:

Business phone lines are designed to optimize the workday and improve the customer experience. For instance, by integrating your cloud phone system with CRM software, you are able to keep all your companies’ interactions in one place, making it easy to quickly pull up customer information, track important metrics, and give the whole company an overview of what is going on with your customers. VoIP solutions also offer additional features designed to improve customer satisfaction not available on personal phones, such as live chat, IVR, and toll-free numbers.

Conclusion

Personal numbers are not meant for business, they are inefficient, unprofessional, and interrupt work-life balance, plus they can put your customer’s data at risk. The longer you leave it, the harder it will get; think of all the places you need to list your personal number – website, invoices, email signatures – and all the customers who may have already saved it in their phones.

While you may think the personal phone number works fine for business, it will impact your ability to scale and run a more organized and streamlined organization. Switching to a VoIP business phone number is a quick, easy, and cost-effective solution that is designed to support small businesses, giving them a professional, flexible, and feature.