Thanks to technology, many entrepreneurs don't need a physical location to develop their business models. Nowadays you can see how physical stores are shifting to online commerce and many of them even decided to become a cloud-based business
In 2016 alone there will be more than 1.6 billion digital buyers in the world and this value will grow thanks to internet penetration and massive use of mobile devices.
Source Statista
With a market of this magnitude, many businesses were born to operate without any dependency of physical locations. As for phone numbers, many continue to use landlines in which each number is linked to an address and depend on network coverage.
Why should an online business have a virtual phone number?
I'll show you 5 reasons why an online business should have a virtual phone service instead of a landline:
1) Portability
In a virtual business, physical offices become almost a formality; something to complete documents and hold meetings, but not part of the core business. When deciding to move the current location, transferring telephone lines becomes sometimes a hard process depending on paperwork and sometimes technical limitations depending on the coverage of telephone networks. Virtual phone numbers are not associated with any location so if you change your office, this will never impact the service nor you will require complex procedures.
2) Consolidated easy to integrate services
A virtual phone service can offer integration with your website, landline, CRM software and many other features than a usual landline. You can also answer calls from an app or a website in addition to traditional phones. Tasks like saving a voicemail, call recording into your CRM can be quite complex in landlines, but in a virtual phone service just it's just a click, or even you can have a CRM integration and this can be done automatically. Virtual phone numbers can be used for send and receive sms online and this is very useful for marketing campaigns and if you don't have internet for answer in a mobile app, you can enable call forwarding and answer calls in a mobile number or landline.
With Toky, you can export voicemails and recorded calls with just a click. Try Toky!
3) User-friendly management tools
If your landline offers services like call history, voicemail and more, generally you need access these options using the phone keypad which is not very friendly. Virtual phone services offer from digital menus to mobile apps that allow you to do more than just listen to the recorded messages.
4) Can grow with your business
Usually, landlines, allow you to add more services and capabilities, but when it comes to reducing them you have some constraints. With virtual phone services you can adjust your features during periods of time, increasing or decreasing according to your needs, for example in a holiday season, you can have several phone lines and then lower them after the season, without complications.
5) You can be local anywhere
Landlines belong to each country; if you want to have a phone number in every place your business needs to be, perhaps you require to have an office there. With virtual phone services you can request a phone number in the country and city you require for the time you need it; all without having to think of offices or complex procedures you can get a toll-free number in many countries easily and all of them will have caller id, custom greetings, call forwarding, call recordings and much more.
With Toky, you can have phone numbers in more than 50 countries; in some of them for free when you buy a Toky business plan. Find out more!
If you are considering an online business and want to have phone support, think in a virtual phone system as an option that perfectly fits your needs. In Toky we can offer you not only phone numbers but a lot of features that will help your business. Try Toky for business now!