This is part one in a two-part series. You can read part two here.
No matter where you go, someone is using or carrying a smartphone—they’re everywhere, and not surprisingly, people are giving up personal landlines in exchange for the portable convenience they offer.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics, as referenced by The Washington Post, more than three-quarters of adults aged 25 to 34 live in homes without a landline and a full 47.4 percent of Americans of all ages have disconnected their aged copper lines.
It’s time that businesses follow their customers’ example in an effort to create a more responsive, increasingly flexible workplace. After all, who needs a cord? Today’s technology can allow you to do everything with your cell phone that you once did with landlines, no matter how busy your business gets. Virtual office services offered through an answering service company can help you finally cut the cords and gain the freedom you’ve needed.
How Does a Virtual Office Work?
With a virtual office or remote receptionist, your callers simply call your central telephone number and are redirected to the person they’re trying to reach—just like they would have been before. The only difference is that your receptionist is part of a live answering service company and you’re no longer paying an immense telephone bill for a PBX system or fighting with a noisy and unpredictable VoIP.
Your business is perfectly poised to cut the cord if:
- You often do business out of the office. If you’re often out of the office doing business, there’s no reason you need to cling to a landline. Instead of keeping an outdated piece of technology that forces you to check in to a physical location, dumping it will give you a chance to be more mobile and increase your flexibility to please your clients even more.
- Your employees juggle cell phones and business extensions for work. When regular customers are calling your employees on their mobile phones and new customers are leaving voicemail, it can become a time-consuming process to integrate the messages from the two mailboxes every day. Why create that kind of hassle when your employees can collect all their messages on the same phone while increasing their availability to your customer base?
- Most calls are redirected to cell phones anyway. In some types of businesses, it has become commonplace to have phones automatically redirect calls to a mobile phone or have receptionists do this instead of engaging voicemail systems. If you’re guilty of sending calls straight to mobile phones, you’re already wasting money on phone services you’re not using, so why not get rid of them? Just dump the landline entirely and use a virtual line to handle those calls.
Making the move to eliminate your business landline may seem like it could lead to career suicide, but it’s not going to be the end. In fact, it could open up all sorts of new possibilities for you, your employees and your company. In part two of this two-part series, we’ll discuss all the benefits of going with a virtual office or remote receptionist in place of a traditional and costly landline.
