10 Reasons Your Business Might Need A Hotline Number

In today’s fast-paced world, more and more people are using virtual internet communications and digital online platforms to communicate. However, hotline numbers won’t be going away for the foreseeable future. People can only use their mobile phones to call others if they have that person’s number. But if they’re cold calling, it’s very unlikely that they’d have the number of the specific person they want to talk to. If they’re calling a business, they wouldn’t even know who they’re talking to right away.

Most people expect a business to have a hotline number they can call whenever they need to ask or request for something to be done. For outbound calling, you might also want to consider getting a Power Dialer. It’s a technology that does the dialing for you, saving your precious time and streamlining your operations.

If your business doesn’t have a hotline number yet, you might want to consider the reasons given in this article.

1. Builds Up Your Credibility

Credibility is one of the most important reasons you should consider getting a hotline number for your business. It’s crucial for any business to have credibility. It’s even more important if they are engaged in the business of providing active customer service for their business operations. Most large corporations and multinationals have business hotline numbers, and some even have toll-free numbers.

But big corporations aren’t the only ones that can set up toll-free numbers. Getting a toll-free number would be a great idea for businesses of all sizes. A business or toll-free number can certainly add to a startup’s credibility. It can also enhance your business image. For all they know, startups could be operating out of a living room or a garage. But nobody has to know that, as long as you’re selling great products and delivering great customer service.

2. Proves The Legitimacy Of Your Business

Having a business hotline number will also make your company look more legitimate. Most companies get hotline or toll-free numbers because they want to sound like a well-established, Fortune 500 company. Getting a virtual phone system and software applications will give your company that professional sound whenever your customers call.

3. Comes With A Professional Voicemail

Another feature of a toll-free or virtual phone system is that you can have a professional voicemail. If you don’t have a business hotline or toll-free number, you can still set up calls to go to voicemail. There are service providers, such as Straight to Voicemail who offer voicemail marketing services and SMS marketing in case you want to enhance your marketing efforts through this medium.

If you don’t have a business voicemail, your clients will most likely be redirected to your personal voicemail instead. While this may seem pleasing for your close friends or contacts who would like to reach you personally, remember that your customers are total strangers. They might not feel as pleased upon reaching your personal voicemail.

When you have a dedicated business hotline or toll-free number, your customers would feel reassured knowing they’ve reached the business line of the company they’re trying to contact. If they’re rerouted to a voicemail, they’ll know they can leave a message about their concerns. They’ll feel assured that someone in the company who’s directly in charge of their concern would get back to them when business hours resume.

4. It Will Improve Customer Satisfaction

Another reason you should get a hotline number for your business is that it will help a lot in improving customer satisfaction. Even in today’s digital business world, customers still tend to look for the phone number of a business. They’d prefer to talk to someone who can help them sort out their concerns immediately. It’s common for customers to get frustrated when they can’t find a company’s business number just because it doesn’t have any. Some of them are left doubting the credibility and reliability of the company.

Having a virtual number is an innovative solution to this problem. With the advent of digital phone technology, companies may now get a virtual phone number. A business hotline can improve customer experience and satisfaction. People still prefer to call a number than shoot an email. They’d like to talk to someone who can answer their questions in real-time. They’d prefer this rather than sending an email since they have no way of confirming their email was received by the company at all.

Having your own toll-free number improves the overall operation of your business. It helps customers reach you easier. They won’t have to spend a dime to make their calls. They’re more likely to continue buying your products or services if they have a convenient way of reaching you, such as through your toll-free number. But you should also hire a dedicated team who can pick up their calls and answer their questions and concerns, even on weekends and in the wee hours.

5. It Is A Great Marketing Tool

Another reason you should get a hotline number for your business is that it’s a great marketing tool. Having a hotline and toll-free number would be a great way to deploy your marketing efforts more powerfully and efficiently – by reaching out to your customers through their phones. In turn, it also makes you more accessible to your customers.

Having a toll-free number would also be an effective way to monitor and track the success of your marketing campaigns. It gives you a way to track where the lead or customer inquiry is coming from. Your marketing campaign usually makes use of numerous ways such as tv ads, radio ads, print ads, billboards, online ads, and maybe even specialty ads in buses and rails. A toll-free system can trace how the call came about in the system.

There’s a way of dividing your toll-free extensions, which is by determining where the calls come from. For example, you can assign one extension for calls coming from people who saw your ads in newspapers, and another extension for calls coming from people who saw your billboards. This way, you’ll know exactly how many leads and inquiries each extension can generate. This would be a more accurate way of measuring the impact of your different marketing campaigns.

For those who have virtual phone numbers with digital phone software applications, you can dig even further by gathering and collating information about your callers. You can analyze this data to better understand how the market is responding to your marketing and advertising efforts. Based on the analytics, you can make adjustments on where you’re spending your marketing and advertising budgets.

6. Protects Your Privacy

Getting a hotline number for your business is also a way of separating your personal numbers from your business numbers. This is an excellent way to keep your mobile phone numbers private. Otherwise, anyone would be able to reach you through your mobile phone numbers. If you publish your mobile phone numbers – even if they’re for office or factory use – there would be a higher likelihood you’ll get random calls from anyone who stumbles into your number.

It’s also possible that you’ll receive all sorts of messages and calls from professional marketers who might get a hold of your mobile phone number. If this phone is being handled by a specific person or group of persons in your office, they’d be distracted every time this office mobile phone number rings or receives a message from a random and unknown source.

7. You Can Designate Business Hours

One of the most important reasons you should get a hotline number for your business is that it would help you designate business hours. Your business hotline or toll-free numbers is a great way to limit your business’ availability to answer phone calls only during a set number of business hours.

You can pre-record messages for your answering machines to handle any inquiries from customers beyond your regular business hours. Another advantage of this is that the voicemails left by your customers after business hours would go to your business phones’ voicemail inbox rather than to your personal voicemail inbox.

Of course, you also have the option of making your toll-free numbers available 24 hours a day and seven days a week. But this would require you to assemble a dedicated team who will work on shifts and take calls at any given time of the day.

8. Allows You To Set Call Notifications And Screening

A very attractive feature of toll-free numbers and virtual phones is that you can set up your business phone system in such a way that you’ll receive notifications whenever there’s an incoming call. You can set up the same feature for everyone else in your management team, and even among your supervisors. When there’s an incoming call, you will be duly notified. It will then ask you whether you’d like to take the call by pressing assigned numbers on the phone keypad. If you opt to ignore the phone call, the phone system will redirect the caller to a voicemail.

From their end, however, customers won’t know that this is what happens in the process. All they’d be able to hear is your phone ringing. You can also set a message to greet your callers. This gives you more time to answer the call without them thinking you’re either ignoring or rerouting their calls. You can also let your phone send text messages or emails whenever you have an incoming call.

You can also use various greeting messages at different times. The business hotline can be set up to give a specific greeting message when your business is open. It would inform your customers that someone will answer their call in a moment. When your store or business is closed, you can set up a message that tells your customers to leave a message. It can also allow them to be redirected to your personal number if they have an urgent or emergency concern about your business.

9. You Can Forward Calls Simultaneously

Another feature of having your own business hotline or toll-free number is that you’d be able to forward different calls to different phones simultaneously. Whenever a call comes in, you can set up your phone system to forward calls from certain sources to the people assigned to take such calls.

This is an excellent feature that would save you a lot of time while keeping your operations streamlined and organized. It will also result in higher customer satisfaction. Your customers will be impressed by how organized your company is, owing to the fact that somebody can immediately answer their questions and address their concerns from the get-go.

Your business hotline can also be configured in a way that whenever there’s an incoming call, the phone will ring simultaneously on multiple extensions. This way, anyone whose extension is ringing can answer the call and attend to their concerns. However, this should be limited to a team in charge of taking phone calls. This way, your customers won’t have to dial several numbers just to try to contact anyone in your business.

10. You Can Scale Up

Another advantage of getting a hotline number for your business is that it’s a scalable solution. When you’re still a startup, you can have a number to answer your customer’s calls and questions. When your business grows and the number of customers increases, you can scale up your business’s phone service as your needs may require. You can choose to expand the number of your lines or even switch to another provider. If you have a virtual phone system, it’s just a matter of setting up more ports or routes if your business needs more.

Improve Your Reputation And Customer Satisfaction

The overall benefit of having your own business hotline or toll-free number is that it would provide your business with a highly professional public image. This is important in maintaining a high level of credibility among your existing and potential customers and clients. The other main aspect of having a company hotline number is to have an effective way of interacting with your customers and the buying public in general. You can also use your hotline number as part of your overall company branding and marketing campaigns.

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