Business Phone Number - Who's Should You Use and How Should You Use it?

Tyler_Brinegar​, give Google Voice a try.  It's free to start and there is a lot of control, including call recording with transcriptions and SMS.  The one pain (but a necessary pain, though) is having to choose which line you want to use when making all outbound calls from your personal cell phone.  But, it is much better than carrying multiple cell phones.  Good luck!

Appreciate you breaking down so clearly! The distinction between an “automation line” and a primary, customer-facing number is a really helpful way to think about it. 

Curious how others here are structuring their setup

This post is much appreciated! We're wrestling through our primary business number & how Jobber's number should play into that. 

Currently, our customer-facing number is the Owner's personal number. The issue we're seeing as we grow is the Owner plays "middle man" and info can slip through the cracks. Simply, communication needs to be tied into our software somehow so that more than one person in the office is accountable for it (thinking toward scaling, bringing on foremen and sales managers). Thus, we've heavily considered making Jobber's number customer-facing. The non-portable nature of Jobber's number gives us hesitation, though. 

Thank you for the communication platform recommendations! We'll be looking into it.

This is a helpful foundation for our interest in phone tactics. All communication currently goes through our owner's personal number and we're looking for ways to alleviate the challenges that coincide with such. Going to book a demo with Chiirp for more insight.

We use Ringcentral.  Amazing as it records and does a transcription of the calls. So helpful. 

The portability point is critical and not talked about enough. Great framework here.

One thing worth layering on top of this setup: whatever number becomes your primary customer-facing line, what happens to calls that come in after hours or when everyone is tied up? RingCentral handles transcription great, but the call still goes to voicemail.

The businesses I've seen scale past the owner as bottleneck problem fastest are the ones who solved the inbound capture piece. Not just who owns the number, but what actually happens to every call that comes in. That is where a lot of jobs quietly walk out the door.

We use Quo (formerly OpenPhone) and it works well. I love how we can switch the call flow so when my office manager is out the calls come to me. I can also set it to ring both of us at the same time or after say 15 seconds if she doesn’t answer then it comes to me. Many options for call flows! 

We are based in the UK and have used Tamar Communications for the past two years.  This gives us a virtual landline, with hunt groups and voicemail (our own message recorded).  We have 3 sub phone numbers (ie Extensions) all on our phones to use as outbound (always shows office number), with an app to Click  and dial! 

When a call comes in, we have chosen that it shows the works number so you don't get confused between personal and work when answering.    Each person in the hunt group has times set of when they can answer, so if I (as admin) am on a call, it automatically goes to the next person etc.  That way we rarely miss a call (unless we are all on the phones - then it goes to voicemail).  If I wish to check on a number that called us, we can just log in  and pull up a log of numbers that have called us and who got the call.

Its extremely easy to use and has never failed us yet.