Virtual Phone Number Can Increase Your Local and Global Presence

Using a virtual phone number has been made possible because of the nature of VoIP technology, and they represent a considerable improvement in some ways, over the constrained nature of landline phone numbers. When you have a landline phone number, it will be necessary to call your phone company and make a specific request to retain that same phone number if you ever have to move to a new location. Whether this is for a residence or for a business, you would then have to wait for the phone company to make the necessary changes before they take effect.

This doesn’t really happen with virtual phone numbers, because they are not tied to specific locations, but are instead associated with an individual user. Since they are independent of location constraints, VoIP virtual phone numbers can travel right along with you if you ever have to make a move, or if your business ever has to relocate. This represents a tremendous convenience for businesses since you would be able to purchase virtual phone numbers that carry local area codes for anywhere in the country.

Your business wouldn’t even need to have an actual physical presence in a given area, in order to have a phone number with that local area code. Whenever customers or other people make calls to your virtual phone number, it would have the appearance of being a local call to them, so they wouldn’t need to make a long-distance call, and pay for extra charges. By the same token, outbound calls can be made as if they were local calls, so that interstate or international calling minutes don’t have to be used.

Business Uses for a Virtual Phone Number

One of the most useful ways for businesses to derive value from virtual phone numbers is by establishing a local presence in some country other than the one where business is headquartered. This provides an excellent opportunity for expanding into new markets, since all local customers can contact the company through the virtual phone number, thereby saving on long-distance phone charges.

Having that local presence is very important for building confidence and trust with consumers of your company’s products. Even though your physical company may be located halfway around the globe, customers will have the impression that it’s close by, and that you are a local company. It’s also possible to purchase numerous virtual phone numbers in that foreign country, so there are no geographic constraints within those country boundaries.

Virtual phone numbers act very much like emails in this way, allowing you to use phones from just about anywhere, as long as there’s a good Internet service available. There are a whole host of other terrific advantages to using hosted VoIP services, which are described in the following discussions.

Utilizing a virtual phone number can give your company a broader reach by avoiding long distance fees and even increase goodwill by giving you a familiar local area code when calling customers.

VoIP Setups

VoIP telephony service which can be implemented in one of two ways, either as a hosted service from an online provider or by setting it up on your own company premises. If you choose to go the route where you host your own VoIP service, it has some similarities to the old way of setting up PSTN on-site.

In a PSTN environment, you would have to contact your telephone carrier to purchase all the necessary hardware, especially the PBX boxes. Your internal phone system would have copper line connections to the rest of the world, and all internal connections would be configured in a similar fashion.

The major difference between this setup and the on-site VoIP configuration is that all the hardware involved is SIP-compliant, which makes it compatible with VoIP technology. The trunk which connects your company to the service provider is no longer copper lines like in the old days, but a high-speed data connection.

When you have your VoIP system hosted by an online provider, your business is completely freed from any kind of management or maintenance requirements. In addition, all equipment is provided by your host, so that you don’t have to invest anything in high-priced hardware or software. All phone service is provided over the Internet, with high-speed capability, and high quality of voice and data transmissions.

Advantages of VoIP for Your Business

One of the main reasons that companies decide to invest in a VoIP telephone service is the tremendous cost savings that can be realized. Long-distance phone charges and local phone charges are both considerably less costly, and if your company decides to have its VoIP services hosted by an online provider, there is also a consolidated monthly fee which covers everything.

This makes it much easier to budget for telephony since it provides a fixed expense each month, rather than some kind of variable amount which fluctuates, based on how smoothly the telephone system operates. There can also be a huge saving involved in avoiding the need for having the in-house expertise to manage and maintain your telephone system, especially with the soaring costs of security being factored in.

Businesses which are small or medium-sized find this appealing because it can help to bridge the gap between themselves and larger corporations. Having a very sophisticated telephone service with an integrated virtual phone number can impress your customers and business associates with the high level of professionalism that your company has facing the external world. In addition to all these intangibles, there are also hundreds of new features available through VoIP telephone systems which were never possible before on the old PSTN systems, which are now being rapidly outmoded.