Local Number Vs Toll Free – Seamless Communication for Potential Customers

Communication is the foundation of any successful business and Telephony communication still plays a key role among all. Though website widgets, social media channels and VoIP are good customer communication platforms but business phone system plays unbeatable role in terms of reach, access and reliability.

Main cause of communication in any business is to provide an easy and result oriented channel of communication to their customer. Wherein customer does not need to give a second thought before reaching out to your business.

• Why is it important to have a business phone system?
• When do you need a local number over toll free and vice – versa?
• Does a bad caller ID affect your business?

Why Its Important to have Business Phone System?

When you just start any business, everything seems easy. Fall deep into it makes you realize how challenging the journey is. Hassel free communication with your customer and understanding the need is the key factor for success of any business and a business phone system is certainly a solution.

It is important to create a rapport between the customer and organization. This connection helps you to understand the needs of customer and then you can customize and provide your business services accordingly.

Choosing a business phone system between local number and toll free depends on your business purpose and necessities. Different aspects of both toll free number and local number can be considered by analysing two factors, one is customer needs and the other is business geography.

Firstly, lets know more about local number and toll-free numbers.

Local Numbers: These number helps businesses to build a local area presence and it becomes easier to reach out to local customers. It basically helps a organization to establish a brand name among local customers. The local phone number also helps marketing team during business campaigns and also to generate business leads.

Toll Free Numbers: It is mandatory to have a local number for business, but it is equally vital to break boundaries building an international and national presence. Toll free numbers are most efficient to reach out to the international/national customers in a very productive manner with low cost catchy and easy numbers.

Better Connectivity

Toll-free number provides better connectivity as compared to a local number. There is no barrier in services, network and the location of your telephone services. It makes very easy to reach international/national clients in a smooth manner.

Also, call charges for international are quite expensive. No company will get a service that is expensive and charge a lot. However, there are some toll-free companies, who provide a toll-free number with local prefix to your overseas customers along with call forwarding facility that allows to route numbers to call centers, mobile phone, and any landline.

A business phone system facility is must for better communication. The necessity of communication cannot be denied when it comes to business world. “No matter the type or size of the company, every business needs a solution to present itself in a professional manner and at the same time to stay connected to colleagues and customers.” Jims Gustke, Vice president of Ooma, View on staying connected with valuable customers.

Important Features

If your target audience are local people with in a city, then the local number is certainly more useful. Besides, even a organization located in different geographical location can also benefit from local numbers by purchasing multiple local Virtual Phone numbers for each city’s office and then unite them in a single processing system. On the other side, a toll free number is more useful for e-commerce companies dealing with national customers.

However, some small businesses still opt a free phone for multiple features in one package. A quality service provider of toll free numbers offers features such as call forwarding, caller ID, porting and a lot of many benefits. It is a risky process and leaves chances of bearing unnecessary expenses and one fine day, you notice that your expenditures have increased over communication.

But, nowadays local numbers also come with these features, companies provide you with an optional toll free number along with local number. Even local numbers have toll free option any they are also provided with professional and advanced services such as masking and call screening, flexible user option, auto attendant with custom voice menu, call details viewer, dashboard etc. Also having a Virtual number (VoIP) can help you with call monitoring service to monitor calls, just by sitting at single location from a web application platform at a remote l

Customer’s Perception

Business is all about to reaching out to more and more customers and understand their requirements. The layman generally considers that a company with a toll free number might be a large national/international company. Though considering that option may be good for some entrepreneurs but it may also make your business lose a customer. For example, if you have an 1800 prefix in your business phone number, some people think that you are located far away even if you are located nearby. It can also possible that a first time client might think that his call will be directed to some huge person in the organization and that can be benefit or drawback depending on the situations.

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According to marketing perspective, both local number and toll free have their pros and cons. When your marketing ad campaigns and promotion are not limited to market in limited locale, then you should go for toll free numbers. Online companies and e-commerce websites locations doesn’t matter. They mostly purchase toll free numbers 1800 or 800 series to reach clients from different areas free of cost. So, if you have a business phone system integrated with toll free number, even distant clients contact you directly on call. This increases over all sales as you are able to reach more customers through easy mode of communication.

Does a Bad Caller ID Affect your Business?

Now that you have a clear idea about local presence and the advantage and disadvantage of the local number and toll free, you can analyse and answer this question. Absolutely, a bad caller ID affects marketing, and identifying a caller ID depends on the text flashing on your screen while you receive a call.

According to the above survey chart, people prefer to answer local number calls, nearly four times more than answering a call from toll free code from some unknown area. But, the chances for answering toll free number with local area code increase a bit more.