In the post-pandemic era, how robust your communication is will perhaps be the biggest determiner of how well your business will fare. Setting up a dedicated business line can have a positive influence on your brand image and a positive impact on your bottom line.

Here are three good business practices a dedicated business line will help you adapt.

1. Protect Your Personal Identity

When starting a new business, some measures are usually taken to safeguard oneself from personal liability . These include incorporating a business and creating a separate email address. Another important way to protect yourself personally is by setting up a dedicated business phone line.

It may feel convenient to use the same phone number for business and personal use, especially in the early stages of establishing a business. But listing your personal phone numbers on a Facebook Business Page, Craigslist ad or even the Better Business Bureau can prove to be risky. All the data that can be accessed using your personal phone number, including credit cards and any two factor authentications for email, online banking and cloud storage becomes vulnerable to attack by telemarketers, phishing scams, hackers and robocalls.

Additionally, if the same phone number is associated with your personal and business banking, making your number publicly accessible puts your business at risk as well.

By setting up a dedicated business line, you can draw clear distinctions between your personal life and professional life from the very beginning without jeopardizing the safety of one for the other.

2. Present your business professionally

Have you had one of these frustrating experiences? You call a business, and it goes to a personal voicemail with a personal greeting — 'This is Mike. Leave a Message.' Or it gets forwarded to a different number which doesn't exist. Or worse, the call gets redirected to an automated voice mailbox, which is, no surprise, full.

None of these scenarios inspire confidence in a customer who's trying to reach a business. Appearing professional and creating a frictionless customer experience goes a long way towards establishing trust in your brand.

A dedicated business line allows you to build a bridge of trust between you and your customer in the following ways:

Business Voicemail and Business Hours

Social media, 24 hours news channels, and the ability to stream any content on any device at any time has turned us into impatient customers. We've come to expect instantaneous responses to our questions. If we don't find the answer we're looking for, we simply move on.

When you have a dedicated business line, staying receptive to customers' needs (even outside of business hours) becomes very easy — simply set up a custom greeting for each situation with information your customers may be looking for.

Large corporations do this very effectively. When you call a Home Depot or a Walmart, for example, their elaborate phone tree is set up to help you reach the department who can answer your question.

With SIPSTACK, setting up a custom phone trees and extensions on your PBX is a breeze.

Here are a few simple modifications you can make to your voicemail greeting to establish credibility with your customer.

• If a customer calls when you're open, greet them with a 'Thank you for calling [Insert Business Name], someone will answer your call shortly, until their call can be directed to the right person.
• If you're closed but have an emergency line, you could include that information after you list your business hours and direct your customers to a support channel.
• If a customer calls when you're closed or on a stat holiday, give them your business hours, and provide them an option to leave a voicemail, and assure them that you will respond within a specific time (usually 24-48 business hours).

Call Screening

A business line has more advanced capabilities than a personal phone number. Today's VoIP business lines can streamline your sales process by sending you notifications and allowing you to screen calls before receiving them.

Call screening allows you to prepare for every call before you answer it. When you receive an incoming call, you will be notified via email or text message (based on the preferences you set), while the person at the other end of the line hears regular ringing. You can also set up a custom greeting for every incoming customer call, giving you more time to answer the phone. Any calls you ignore will be redirected to voicemail.

Setting up a business line and a business voicemail (which lists your business hours) guarantees that you won't miss a single lead!

Consistency in Branding

The simplest way to achieve brand recognition is to stay consistent. By using one phone number across all your business communications, promotional collateral and social media channels, your customers will never have questions about how to reach you.

You never have to worry about losing business because your old cell phone number was listed on a piece of collateral.

3. Empower Your Remote Staff

As more businesses embrace remote work into their work culture, it's become more important than ever to empower your employees with the flexibility to work from anywhere.

Listing one phone number streamlines the sales process. Today, VoIP technology has evolved to significantly improve the end user experience. You can create incredibly complex solutions in the backend while appearing intuitive and straightforward to the customer. For example, one business phone number could be set up to receive multiple calls simultaneously. You could program each call to ring on multiple devices, allowing your sales team to respond according to their schedule, and do what they do best — sell.

SIPSTACK gives our partners the tools to set up a dedicated business lines in minutes, making it is easier than ever for your customers to reach you.

If you're looking for a comprehensive VoIP solution for your business or want to be a SIPSTACK partner contact us and we will be able to help you.