Calling Up Your Customers On The Cheap

The *Super* Cheap Way To Call Customers

If you're ok being jammy, simply call them up using your personal phone but with the withheld number enabled. There's a setting on your phone to switch off caller ID so on your recipient's side it'll show as an unknown/private number.
Sure, that'll work. But you'll likely get a lower pick-up rate as people associate withheld phone calls with being sketchy.

Downsides Of Using Your Personal Number

The first one is about perception. It's not great falling into the same bucket as car crash claims sellers and phishing scams with your withheld number.

But also, for various things you'll need to submit a phone number. That could be for your bank, Paypal, review sites, various ecommerce apps etc. Some of these will expose your phone number to customers (sometimes this is unavoidable, for example with certain payment processors). The annoying thing is that it's hard to spot it since you spend your time in the admin section, not necessarily the customer-facing UI.

I have had a few cases of customers ending up calling my personal number directly. Not a great impression for the brand and definitely not ideal for me! 

Getting a Proper Business Phone Number

The obvious solution is to get a business phone number.
I did some searching and went down a rabbit hole - there is no shortage of companies wanting to sell you various solutions in this space!
The trouble is that the cost racks up quickly, especially if you don't really need to use it that much.

Introducing Google Voice

Luckily I stumbled across Google Voice (I should have known they would have something for this).
Apparently, it's been live as long ago as 2009, but I'd never heard of it.

You're probably already paying for Gsuite for Gmail or Gdrive, so the good thing is that this is an add-on that doesn't take much time at all.
Here's what the setup looks like.

You add a new location:

Then you can request the creation of your very own real phone number :)

You have to wait a day or so for it to be generated. But in pretty short order you can fire up this page on your browser and make outbound calls 'til your heart's content.

But that's not all.
Now that customers will be getting phone calls from a real number, what if they call back?

Assuming you don't want to handle inbound calls, you can set up an autoresponder with a pre-recorded greeting.

It also allows you to set up bits of logic such as opening hours or sequences if you want to get fancier.

So in a day or so (most of which is just waiting for the number) you can have a pretty professional setup going.

What's The Cost?

Google didn't actually tell me the price from what I could see.
Not ideal, but I just went ahead and made a note to check back once the invoices were billed.

So FYI those bills were around £13.00 per month.
And I'm not making that many calls - last month was definitely <20.
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