When you start a business, it may be tempting to use your personal phone number for work purposes. But there are multiple reasons why you should get a separate business number.
If you do not get a separate work phone number, you are leaving yourself open to the following four risks.
Personal and Business Calls Become Indistinguishable
Let us start with the obvious: when you use the same phone number for both your personal calls and business calls, you will not be able to distinguish between the two.
That means when you answer your phone to an unknown caller, you run the risk of not being professionally prepared.
For instance, you are sure to answer personal calls with a different greeting and tone than you would with business calls.
If you always answer your phone with, say, the name of your business, to provide professionality, your friends will end up confused. On the other hand, if you answer with a simple “hello” to cover all bases, it will come across as unprofessional when you are answering business calls.
You can quickly bring an end to such confusion by getting a separate business phone number. The good news is, there are several options for getting a second phone number, including adding a work number to your existing mobile phone.
You Become Exposed to More Threats
Having just one phone number certainly brings risk to your business in terms of turning off potential customers, due to the non-professionality involved. But you can face greater risks than poor customer service when you use your personal number for your business number.
A key issue is that you expose yourself to more threats. Everyone knows the dangers of giving out personal information, but many business people do not realize that that includes giving out their personal numbers for business purposes.
Your number will be accessible to a wide number of people. After all, you will be giving it out on promotional materials, business cards, and your website, and giving it to suppliers and contractors.
When so many people have access to your number, you massively increase the risk of being targeted by scammers and identity thieves.
You Become Exposed to Telemarketers and Robocalls
Following on from the above point, using your personal phone number for your business means you increase the risk of being contacted by telemarketers and robots.
Spammers and telemarketers can call thousands of numbers at once. When your number is a part of their system, you could continually get unwanted spam and telemarketing calls.
Not only will that be a major headache. It will also mean you waste a lot of time picking up the phone for non-personal and non-business reasons.
Of course, you also increase the threat of being scammed over the phone. By keeping your business and personal phones separate, you can reduce that problem.
You could even use a virtual phone system for your business calls that helps to filter out spammers and scammers by putting calls into an automated call tree. That means when a robocall does not select an option from the menu, the call will eventually time out; enabling you to answer more actual business calls.
It Is Difficult to Maintain a Healthy Work/Life Balance
Everyone seems to be striving for a better work/life balance these days.
That means not answering business calls during your allocated non-work time. But when you use the same number for both personal and business calls, you run the risk of never switching off from work.
If you have no idea if a number on the screen is calling for personal or business reasons, you will find your non-work time is continually taken up with work matters.
So, it is best to get separate personal numbers and business numbers.
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