Stop right there!

Okay, your home phone or cell phone may be enabling you to conduct business but it may also be preventing you from gaining new customers. Most people like doing business with professional businesses knowing that their needs are being taken care of by a professional. Sure you are a professional but if you don't look like one potential customers may not become your customers.  Discover this simple, affordable solution to add professionalism and solve future issues.

Problems

You home phone allows you to get connected to your clients when you are home.  Although your professionalism can be diminished when your child answers the phone or your home answering machine message doesn't provide that professional edge.  Okay, home phone for outgoing calls okay but incoming calls really not that great.  As well, when you are out and about you would hate to miss that opportunity because you can't be reached.

Now your cell phone does provide more opportunities.  Most likely you can tell your kids not to answer your cell phone and you can create a more professional message on the voice mail answering message.  Don't get me wrong this can take you a long way in your small business, but it does pin you in a little. Problems arise when you want to change your carrier or phone number for any reason such as you move area codes or see a much better deal at a competing carrier.  Of course you could change but what about all your clients, business cards, and other business collateral which will need notification and changes.

The good news is that you have just grown your business and include a new employee or partner, what phone number do you publish?  It is probably not the time to go looking for a completely new phone system.  Also, now publishing both cell phone numbers is an option but you now get the picture...

Solution

Purchase an affordable phone number for your business and use the solution to route the calls where you want.  There are many services available online today which will allow you to purchase phone numbers and use their routing services.  The pricing and options range very widely.

We have used a service called www.flynumber.com which provides a fantastic solution to the problems highlighted above at a very reasonable price. For under $3 USD a month you can have a new phone number for your business. You can use this centralized number like many businesses do to route your calls to your home, cell phone, partners cell phone, directly to email, etc... Sound familiar, press 1 for customer service, press 2 for billing, etc. well you can make this all happen for your business very easily.

There are many options with this solution which helps solve all the potential issues which can be caused as you grow your business on your cell phone!

How it works

Getting your new phone number is easy.  

• You select the country and city for the appropriate area code (there are premium area codes (NY, Toronto))
• Select PBX (I will tell you more about PBX in a minute) to route your calls
• Fill in the rest of your account details
• Setup your payment option (Paypal)

Now that you have a new phone number you can use FlyNumber's built in PBX software solution to route your calls.  This drag and drop tool allows you to set up menus for your callers to direct them to which extension number to press. You can set up a number of extensions for customer service, billing, or just people. It allows you to record your own voice for the menus which is very flexible as you can rerecord any time and change your menu as your business changes.

Here is a screen shot of the PBX being used to set up a new call flow (you will notice things highlighted in red because they need further set up):

Calls can be forwarded to you landlines (the ones connected at offices and homes including cell phones) or to SIP devices.  SIP device is a common term used for a type of online digital software phone.  This is some software you would download to your computer and after setting it up with the flynumber SIP details you could make and receive calls from your computer for free.  Incoming calls which are routed to your landlines does have a nominal fee attached which is $0.03 USD in north America but reasonable around the world.

Calls which are not answered can be sent to a voice mail box which captures the message and emails it to any email account you want.  The voice message is attached to the email and can be played anywhere.

No as you can see, when you have a new person come into your company they can use their cell phone and you can simply route calls to their device.  Your branded business number always remains in front of your potential customers.