A virtual phone number is the soil in which the seeds of businesses grow. This has never been truer, more so in an ever digital world. Not that we’d presuppose the important role that a virtual phone number plays in growing businesses is tragically overlooked by many small business owners. Your phone number itself is often overlooked, just seen as some sort of ethereal thing, not even a tool to use- just something that you pay some money for each month. Your phone itself understandably garners attention, but your number? Not so much.
Well, we at MightyCall think differently. If you want your business to grow and sprout big beautiful flowers (if we’re continuing the original metaphor, the flowers would be something like checks going into your bank account), you should take full advantage of the possibilities offered by a virtual phone number. Below, we’ll walk you through the biggest ways you can use your virtual phone number to water the soil in which your business can grow.
Use Your Virtual Phone Number to Spread Your Small Business
Have you ever noticed how dandelions are…well, everywhere? Doesn’t matter what province, country, or continent you’re on- if you’re in the summer, and you’re in a field that is not in a desert, you’re probably going to see dandelions. That’s because dandelions know how to spread like, well, plants.
And your small business can do the same. Many small business owners are increasingly finding that geography is no longer a hindrance to growing their companies- so why should it stop you? Have you been eager to expand into a market across the state? What about across the country? With virtual phone numbers from MightyCall, it’s a crazy easy process- just purchase a phone number with an area code from or near the area you want to expand to, and…voila. Start calling. People are going to be way more relaxed when it comes to picking up a phone number from their area versus one coming from someplace two thousand miles away that they’ve never heard of. In fact, with the litany of spam calls hitting people’s cell phones as of late. If it’s an area code they don’t recognize they might just not pick up at all making it impossible for you to ever expand your small business. Don’t cut yourself off at the knees and don’t trim your business before it has a chance to bloom in new fields.
A virtual phone number can allow you to expand in a way that makes you more comfortable and allows for your potential new clients to have better peace of mind.
Build a Centralized De-Centralized Team with a Virtual Phone Number
We know, that may seem self-contradictory at first- but stay with us. Going off of the previous section, let’s say your expansion is a success- you’re actually able to gain a foothold in a far-off town. But you want to expand there, not just a foothold. One dandelion in a field looks out of place. Thousands look charming.
One easy way of going about that is hiring someone who knows the area. You might not know the town as well. What areas are worth calling and which areas you should skip. Someone living there, who can interact with your clients in person and make your business seem more “real”? Now that’s expansion.
And with a virtual phone number, this is even easier to achieve. With a MightyCall account, your number(s) is based around an online web panel where you and your employees can leave each other comments about clients and where call history (both incoming and outgoing) can be viewed (along with some other features, like the auto attendant, which we’ll discuss below). This way your team, even if it’s apart, can still work together in a seamless way. Plus, the process of adding new team members to your MightyCall account is straightforward and painless.
Work Beyond Time
So let’s go back to our dandelions. Imagine if all dandelions had to grow in the same time frame that the original dandelion grew. Let’s say, for instance, that the first dandelion appeared in the middle of Eurasia. It’d be impossible! The sun shines on different parts of the planet at different times. Expansion just wouldn’t work. Also, most dandelions would be dead within days.
So it also is with your small business. If you want to expand, especially outside of your time zone, then you need to have a plan for it. Thankfully, virtual phone numbers can once again help with that. One of the key features that come with MightyCall’s virtual phone numbers is the ability to set your working hours for each of your numbers and to decide what happens when you receive a call off-hours. So if you have a number for a time zone that’s three hours behind. Then, that can have its own working hours. Don’t have to worry about having to close up shop three hours before you normally would. Therefore losing potential clients and missing callers. If there’s a night you have time to stay up late? You can easily change your hours to reflect that.
And when someone calls your number when you aren’t working? Well, let’s go back to our previous example of having an employee working in that far-off time zone. If someone calls your number when you aren’t working, but your employee is, you can have that call automatically forwarded to your employee’s number. Make sure that you never miss a call or a customer.
Automatically Attend to Your Clients with Your Virtual Phone Number’s Auto Attendant
The ability to edit your working hours that we mentioned above is actually part of a larger system that comes with your virtual phone number– MightyCall’s auto attendant. The auto-attendant is something that you can customize from the ground up and allows you to fully control practically every aspect of your small business from the central web panel previously discussed here.
Your auto attendant offers a plethora of features. You can set up an automatic menu with frequently asked questions. Questions that you can record yourself answering with ease, with files from your phone or computer. So that you can thin out the herd of callers, so to speak, and save time for the ones who really need to talk to you about something serious. The auto attendant can also direct callers for you, without any human needing to do the transferring. And of course, among many other things, you can also use it to set your working hours.
Virtual Vanity Numbers
With this ability to spread geographically, you’re already going to be attracting plenty more eyes than you would if you stayed in your one area. But what if you could attract even more?
Trick question- of course, you can! One type of virtual phone number is a vanity number, which is basically a “number” composed of letters that correspond to the numbers on a phone pad (think 1-888-GET-SLIM, if you were running a series of gyms). These are way easier for customers to remember than some random string of numbers that they might see once quickly in a commercial or at a bus stop brochure. Vanity numbers are just one of the ways that you can use your number to help you grow your business- as the soil in which your small business grows.
Virtual Phone Numbers Help Your Business Grow
A plant needs a healthy environment, care, and careful attention paid to it. But if you give it the right soil, it’ll bloom and spread itself over all sorts of terrains.
The same is true for your small business. Give it the soil it needs to grow. Get yourself a virtual phone number with MightyCall today!