6 Premium Phone Services to Add When You Buy a New Number

Are you getting the most out of your phone number? When you reserve a custom domain name for your business, you presume to also sign up for web hosting services and a website to maximize the value of your domain. A custom phone number is no different, because premium phone services help make a good number great.  On its own, your custom phone number is a unique and versatile marketing asset. Coupled with just a few additional services, however, it has the potential to become an essential tool that improves your service, operations, and promotional campaigns. 6 Premium Phone Services to Improve Your Business

So what services should you consider to get more from your new number? Below we look at six additional premium services that will help to maximize your value. 

Custom Greetings

Since the advent of voicemail business owners have been wary of creating their own greetings for their phone systems. Often the worry is that they won't sound professional enough. It’s a well-founded fear, because even the slightest hint of amateurism. As a result, many companies turn to professional voice talent to record custom greetings for callers. From voicemail to an options menu, a premium greeting that makes use of professional voice provider is a benefit to businesses who want to sound more authoritative. This service can be purchased for as little as $55, which is a one-time fee that will be repaid many times over as potential customers get a sense for the professionalism of your business. [search-tag]

Virtual PBX

A private branch exchange, or PBX, is an internal communications platform that allows for multiple workstations to communicate between one another (such as from one office to another). Traditionally, these systems were expensive and required on-site staff to manage. Today, these systems have moved to the cloud, allowing small businesses to make use of a cloud-based virtual PBX for a fraction of the cost of a traditional premise-based system. Forwarding your new number to a virtual PBX will allow callers to reach the department they’re looking for without delay. It also helps to streamline your company communications, both internally and with external customers and partners. Reaching the wrong department and wasting time with someone who cannot help are two of the top concerns for customers who prefer to call. Leveraging a virtual PBX system is one way to alleviate this type of service issue. 

Hunt Groups

Hunt groups work on a forwarding system that allows calls to be forwarded to a variety of different locations. This is especially useful if your business operates multiple locations that use the same custom phone number. With hunt groups in place, different offices and sales teams can all benefit from the same marketing campaign. This is useful not only for companies with several locations, but also for small sales teams who travel a lot and companies who operate in "the cloud" and have a lot of remote workers. Like virtual PBX systems, hunt groups provide another way you can ensure that callers end up in the right place. Call Announcement

If your business uses different phone numbers for different campaigns, call announcements are a great way to track the effectiveness of each. Call announcements play a brief message to the person receiving the call to let them know which phone number the call is coming from. This is a great service to use to determine which marketing strategies are working the best for driving phone calls to your business, especially when used with multiple phone numbers. 

Call Recording

Call recording is the most valuable premium service in regards to customer service. Recording calls means that business owners can monitor interactions between customers and employees. We explored some of the advantages of call recording in a previous article, with the most common being to better understand common inquiries from customers, assess training requirements, and to adjust operational and/or marketing strategies based on those results. Recording your customer calls is also useful to assess whether certain employees are adhering to company policy on phone etiquetteand if they are adequately fulfilling the customer’s wants and needs.Text/SMS to Email

Consumers are increasingly relying on text messaging to communicate with the businesses with whom they interact. But not all businesses are set up to receive text messaging through their business phone number. The text/SMS to email premium service not only text-enables your phone number, it also forwards and allows you to respond to text messages sent to your phone number via email. You can learn more about the wider benefits of a text-enabled number here. Your phone number has the potential to be a powerful tool for your business. Adding any of these premium services will greatly increase your phone number’s impact, and help to drive more calls and more customers to your business.