Conducting Business on the Go with a Virtual Phone

Rather than giving clients your Los Angeles office number or your LA mobile phone number, you could get a virtual number for New York and another one for Barcelona.

If you frequently conduct business on the go, a virtual phone is a must. Sure, you could give out your mobile phone number and hope your phone works overseas, but why would you want to do that? Do you really want customers, prospects, business partners, and colleagues to have your personal mobile phone number? Can you be sure that they’ll respect its sanctity once you return and can be reached via your office phone number? A virtual phone is the answer.

What is a Virtual Phone?

It’s not the phone itself per se, but rather the number. A virtual phone number is extremely portable. It is not tied to a single device or physical phone jack. Though your virtual phone number will have its own country and area code, you do not actually need to reside in a specific geographic area in order to get a local virtual phone number. It is truly virtual.

For example, let’s say that you have a home office in Los Angeles but frequently help clients in New York and Barcelona. You also frequently travel to New York and Spain on business. Rather than giving clients your Los Angeles office number or your LA mobile phone number, you could get a virtual number for New York and another one for Barcelona. Once you get these numbers, you’d then log into your virtual phone account online and configure them to ring to your designated phone. When working from home, the ring to number would be your home office phone. When traveling, you can easily change it to your mobile phone, hotel room phone, temporary office space phone, or a disposal cell phone obtained in Spain.

Advantages of a Virtual Phone Number

With a virtual phone number, you can be reached far and wide —whenever and wherever you want to receive phone calls. At the same time, if you don’t want to be reached, you can program your virtual phone to route your calls elsewhere such as to voicemail, a call center / answering service, or to your assistant.

Features such as time of day routing, voicemail, and auto attendant are particularly useful. For example, you may want calls to ring to your mobile phone during local business hours and then ring to your voicemail after hours. Depending on your virtual phone service, you may even be able to receive voicemail messages as transcribed text via email. If you plan on being unreachable for an extended time period, you could set up your auto attendant to inform callers that you are unreachable and then give them options to either leave a voicemail message or speak with your assistant.

Because your virtual phone number can follow you wherever you go, there’s no need to give up your personal mobile phone number. Imagine being able to attend your child’s baseball game or dance recital without being interrupted by clients who don’t realize that you’re enjoying some quality time with your family. Should you feel the need to be reachable, simply route your virtual phone number to your mobile phone and take calls as needed. The choice is yours.

You can also use your virtual phone number to make cheap international phone calls. Remember, with a virtual phone number, you can designate any number as the ring to number. Need to call an important client in Barcelona from LA? No problem, simply change your Barcelona virtual phone number to the client’s phone number temporarily. Dial your virtual phone number which will now ring to your client’s phone. Discuss your business while enjoying your service providers low per minute rates for international calls and then end the call. Finally, switch the ring to number back and receive virtual phone calls once again.

Being in full control over your availability is empowering; it’s good for you as well as for your contacts. Order a virtual phone number today.

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