Taking a Business Phone Number With You

Why the number matters more than the line

Your phone number appears on vehicles, signage, invoices, business cards, directory listings, your website and every quote you have ever sent.

Changing it means reaching all of those, and reaching the ones you do not control means asking and waiting.

Which makes the number a business asset in the same way the domain is, and it is treated with considerably less care.

Most small businesses have never asked whether they could keep theirs if they moved.

The three arrangements

A traditional line tied to a physical address. Moving premises usually means a new number, particularly across an area boundary.

A mobile, which travels with you and is tied to a contract and a handset, and cannot easily be answered by two people.

A virtual number, which is not tied to a location at all and forwards to wherever you say, changeable in minutes.

The third is what most small businesses want and few have, usually because nobody presented it as an option.

What a virtual number gives you

• It survives a move, of premises or provider.
• It can ring several devices, or different ones at different times.
• It separates business from personal, without a second handset.
• It can be routed by hours, to voicemail out of hours automatically.
• It can be handed to somebody else, when you are away or if you sell.
• It gives you a local presence without premises there.

The third is the one one-person businesses value most immediately. Answering the business number in a business voice, and knowing which is which before you pick up, is worth the monthly cost on its own.

A worked example

A plumber whose number had been his home landline for eleven years, printed on two vans and thousands of invoices.

He moved house, across an exchange boundary, and was told the number could not come with him.

What that meant in practice: re-signing both vans, reprinting stationery, updating his listing and directory entries, and losing calls from customers who had the old number in a drawer.

He estimates he lost work for a year afterwards, mostly from repeat customers who tried the old number and gave up.

He now uses a virtual number forwarding to his mobile. It has followed him through one further move and a change of mobile provider, and neither required telling anybody anything.

The monthly cost is small. The eleven years of goodwill attached to the old number were not.

Porting an existing number

The step that makes this practical for a business that already has a number worth keeping.

Most numbers can be moved to a different provider, including onto a virtual service. The process takes days to weeks and is initiated by the new provider rather than the old one.

Do not cancel the old service first. Cancelling releases the number and it may not be recoverable, which is the single most common way businesses lose one.

Check portability before committing to anything, since a small number of arrangements cannot be moved.

The counter-case

Where a simple mobile is the right answer.

A one-person business with no premises, no staff, and no intention of changing either. A mobile is portable, cheap, and does everything needed.

Where call quality matters more than flexibility and the local network is poor, a fixed line can genuinely be better.

And where a business is already established on a number that works and is not at risk, changing for its own sake gains nothing.

The trigger for acting is a move, a growth in staff, or the realisation that the number is tied to something you might leave.

What to check before choosing a provider

1. Can the number be ported out if you leave them.
2. What the contract term is, and what happens at renewal.
3. How routing is changed, and whether you can do it yourself.
4. What happens during an outage, and whether calls fail over.
5. Whether voicemail reaches you by email as well as by phone.
6. Whether the number is genuinely yours or licensed to you.

The first and last are the same question in different words, and they are the ones worth asking before signing rather than after.

Two numbers, and whether to have them

A question that arises once a business has more than one person.

Separate numbers for sales and service sound organised and mean customers guess wrong and are transferred, or give up.

One number that routes intelligently is nearly always better: it is what appears on everything, it is what people remember, and the routing is your problem rather than theirs.

Where a second number genuinely helps is for a distinct brand or a specific campaign you want to measure, and even then it is worth weighing against the consistency it costs.

For most small businesses the answer is one number, everywhere, answered properly.

Local numbers and what they signal

Worth a moment because it affects enquiries.

A local area code signals a local business, and for a trade that is a genuine advantage. A national or toll-free number reads as larger and less local, which for some businesses is what they want.

A mobile number alone reads as a one-person operation, which is accurate for many and occasionally not the impression wanted.

What matters most is consistency: one number everywhere, matching your listing, which is exactly the same principle that governs how your address is written.

Answering it well

Worth saying, because a portable number is only useful if somebody picks it up.

A missed call from a new enquiry is usually a lost job. Most people calling a trade do not leave a message, and a proportion do not call back.

Which makes call handling worth more attention than most website work. Options include diverting to a second person, a call answering service for busy periods, or simply a voicemail that gives a realistic callback time.

The worst arrangement is a number that rings out with no voicemail at all, which tells the caller nothing and leaves you unaware they tried.

Second worst is a voicemail nobody checks, which is the same outcome with an extra step and the caller believing they have been in touch.

The practical first step

Find out what you currently have.

Is your number portable. Is it tied to premises. Whose name is the account in. Could somebody else answer it if you were away for a fortnight.

Those four questions take one phone call to your provider, and the answers determine whether this is urgent or simply worth having on file.

The same audit applies to every other account the business depends on, as covered in who holds the keys to your site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.