Why You Shouldn’t Use A Personal Phone Number for Business

There are more than enough moving parts in starting a company and the last thing you want to do is have to sign up for a phone service for your small business. Your personal number is just too convenient to pass up, right? After all, it’s right in your pocket with no extra costs. You might not know but you’re putting your private life and your business at risk. If you’re still on the fence about not using your personal number, here are a few reasons why you should stop.

You tie yourself to your personal number

With life moving at lightning speed toward everything mobile, it’s getting harder and harder to separate yourself from your number. Online banking sends text verifications for logins, lots of services ask for your number upon signing up, and you’ll certainly need to list contact details on social media accounts, Google Maps for your brick-and-mortar, etc. It follows us seemingly everywhere. And if you do decide to change your number after a long while using your own for your business, the ripple effect, both in your personal and professional life, can be more of a hassle than you want to deal with.

Using a personal number removes your privacy

Hopefully, your business is doing well, but if you’re using your personal number, that means you’re constantly “working.” Calls, texts, and problems come at all hours…especially if your company offers a service. You become overloaded and burnout and make silly mistakes. You’re already working hard enough on your business, so be sure to make some time for yourself to disconnect. Otherwise, you’re not able to shut off at all seeing as you and only you are the round-the-clock access to the company.

You Limit you phone capabilities

Sure, it’s convenient and you’re saving money, but if you need to actually set up rudimentary features for call processing, you’re backed into a corner. If the business is booming, you might be too far gone to change your contact information. It’s never a good look for a customer to call a disconnected number. And apart from that, you have little to no control or oversight over your employees interacting with customers because they’re using their own numbers. It turns into a professional quagmire.

Employee-customer interaction might become uncontrollable

Let us take an example that you are a business owner who has employed several employees. If you allow them to use their personal numbers when handling clients, some areas of your business might be difficult to control. For your business progress, it is crucial to keep track of all business activities within your enterprise. Areas such as sales and customer service must be considered crucial for any business progress. When you allow your employees to use their personal numbers, you might not be able to know how frequently and when your staffs engage your customers, how they handle discussions and which problems they fail to provide solutions to your customers. In fact, this will give them an opportunity to even sell goods and services at a higher price than the required price and pocket the difference. Also, your employees might decide to make deals directly with your customers without your consent thus becoming your competitor within your business. To avoid all this menace, it is good to have a separate phone number for all your business matters.

Difficulties in making decisions when you begin to employ more staff

When you employ a new staff to your business, you will be forced to either buy a new line of work with that employee without them taking calls on behalf of your business. Again, if the new employee has to make calls on behalf of the business, then they will have to either borrow your phone and make customer calls or use their personal phones to make calls. A business that allows everyone to use their personal phone numbers for business matters tends to be difficult for a business owner to ascertain that everyone is doing their job well. Here, it will be difficult to tell whether your employees are ignoring calls from your customers or they are even not being responsive enough to your customers. For this reason, therefore, we recommend that you buy a separate phone number for business matters.

Difficulty changing to a different number especially after your business has been established

At this point, you will find yourself in a crossroad. The choices that you will be faced with are either you change your personal phone number and make all your friends and relatives know that or change your business number and let all your clients and employees know that you have switched your phone number. All these options are not easy to take, therefore, to ease yourself from this hectic situation, you need to get a separate line and get things working smoothly.

Your personal number will be swamped with Robocalls

I’ve gotten two while writing this—they just never stop. You can take the step to register your personal number on the Do Not Call Registry or download some spamming apps but they’ll likely continue. And if there’s a string of robocalls that you answer (which in turn beget more) and then you skip a few, those ones you didn’t answer could be current or potential customers.

Telephone Connections has your solution

Get a VoIP Phone from Telephone Connections.  If you’d like to get started today, contact us for a free consultation or call us at (918)982-6840