Despite an era of email, messaging, and chatbots nothing presents a more professional image and brand than picking up the phone and taking a call. Your customers and clients often want to talk to a human being to get things resolved quickly or to make complex requests. Many are not fans of email, messaging, or chatbots and prefer a more human way of communicating. Regardless, of the reasons, your business needs a phone number to meet customer and client expectations.
Source: MightyCall
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How to Find a Freephone Provider
As well as providing a phone number customers and clients expect it to be free. This sounds daunting given that traditionally there are associated infrastructure costs. In turn, this led to many businesses not implementing free phone numbers for their business and was unable to compete with corporate big hitters. This has now changed and you can even set up a phone number for an international business in 5 minutes enabling you to promote it much faster.
The trick to finding an international and free UK phone number provider is to find one where you only pay call costs. This enables you to provide a toll-free service to your clients and customers avoiding infrastructure alterations and costs. If you’re a small or medium enterprise you can now convey more professionalism by offering the same level of service as corporate businesses. This opens new opportunities for customer acquisition while allowing you to increase customer retention rates accordingly.
Source: Burner
Reaching New Markets
With UK phone operators now happy to implement your number without infrastructure costs, you are now free to tap into international markets. Your business may be based in Denver or Berlin, but if your customers are in the UK you can set up a toll-free number for them with ease. The number will have a familiar area code inspiring trust. It is fair to say that people are tired of overseas call centres and have become weary given communication issues that have been reported.
Toll-free, local phone numbers adds to your branding and professionalism and gives you a new marketing vector.
Consider, you can put your new number in:
- Radio and TV ads
- Newspaper and imprint ads
- Online ads
- Websites including your own
- Social Media
There is a wealth of places where a phone number can be placed to drive contact with future and current clients.
Source: Elite Group
Building Trust in your Business
A phone number adds a new trust dimension to your business. People are suspicious if there are a limited number of ways a person can interact with a business. This is understandable given that online fraud is reported often. Another factor is that big global online brands have made it difficult to find a contact phone number for them.
This gives you an opportunity to introduce your brand as a trusted brand simply by providing a phone number for people to call.
Remember that should an urgent issue arise people want a number to phone, a means of contact. It is far easier for most people to sort out an issue over the phone than via a small novel of emails going back and forth. If you can help your customer and client base with issues and take calls from prospective ones, this builds a lot of trust.
If they can find a phone number especially an 800 one easily they are likely to remain a client or customer for a very long time to come.
Keep your Private Phone Number Private
Deploying an 800 number also allows you to completely separate your work and private phone numbers. This allows for better client management as you know that a call on one line is for you, the other is a business inquiry. In turn, this allows you to adopt the right mindset when taking calls.
Source: pctechmag.com
Go Beyond with Better Customer Service
As well as providing toll-free local phone numbers for the UK and internationally, you can also set up call forwarding and other useful tools for better customer and client management. You can enable aspects such as taking payments via the phone system to keep the revenue flowing in.
The phone is coming back in popularity as the limitations of other methods are being realised. Talking to someone on the phone is preferable and as such gaining in popularity.
The better your customer service the more likely you are to be recommended. Recommendations count for a lot in business and a freephone 800 number is a massive assist in customer and client acquisition.
Bear in mind that we live in an age where many companies and clients now do things online and are faceless despite having a picture of the customer service rep. Having a UK freephone number or a local number abroad can be the difference from making a sale or acquiring a new contract and losing the business.
