Do you feel stretched for time with neverending customer calls? Does the lack of features in your current telephone line hold your operational efficiency back? If you said yes to both, then you’re the perfect candidate for an inbound phone number.
In Australia, you can choose one of three inbound telephone lines—13, 1300, and 1800 numbers. These numbers can help elevate the customer experience and operations of your company, no matter where your business is headquartered within the region. From improving your marketing efforts to increasing customer satisfaction, there are many reasons why securing an inbound number is important in this day and age.
If you’re looking to explore the benefits before committing to this service, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll cover six reasons why your business can benefit from having an inbound number in Australia. Let’s get into them in more detail.
1. It Helps Your Brand Stand Out
It’s no secret that businesses and customers are more likely to engage with brands with a certain level of credibility.
An inbound number from a reputed provider, like Teleca’s 1300 numbers, can give your customers the impression that you’re operating an established and highly reputed business, regardless of its actual size.
This is because, for one, inbound numbers have a different initial number sequence than personal phone numbers. This automatically allows it to stand out, particularly in marketing materials like billboards, social media pages, search engine snippets, and review websites.
Secondly, it also gives your business the option to incorporate some text into the inbound number, like 1300-WATCHES for a local watch brand.
This alphanumerical incorporation—also called a vanity number—can help improve customer recall when they want to purchase something from your brand but don’t remember the exact numerical sequence of it. It can also make for catchier marketing material.
In any case, having an inbound number is a great way to foster trust among customers and collaborators. This is especially true if your local competitors are only using a personal phone number, helping you stand out among your competition and look more trustworthy.
2. Separates Personal and Work Activities
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance is essential for life satisfaction—and as an employee, it can be as simple as logging off by 5.
As a business owner, however, achieving a work-life balance is much harder to achieve. Besides mindfully creating an optimal schedule for yourself to succeed in both personal and professional endeavours, you also have to make the right preparations to ensure that the separation persists.
There are many tools that can help you with that, one of which of course is an inbound number. With a business number, the caller won’t automatically call your phone line but will instead be rerouted to an open, dedicated phone line, which you can set up to be supervised by an agent.
For entrepreneurs with a personal phone line, life can feel much harder to balance, and it is possible for this lack of separation to reduce your ability to dedicate yourself to each discipline to the fullest. This can cause bad outcomes like unhappy clients and an unhappy home life, which, needless to say, can be much more grave and expensive than setting up a new phone line.
3. Increases Communication Channels
If your business is experiencing unprecedented growth, you’ll need to increase the number of telephone lines to support this growing demand. An inbound number is the primary tool to use to help you propel your communication channel in forward motion.
With an inbound number, you can configure your system to accommodate multiple callers at the same time. The built-in system in the number automatically connects callers to an open agent line, creating a seamless customer inquiry experience that doesn’t have to rely on manual switches and long wait times.
Furthermore, and most importantly, more open lines mean more chances for you to satisfy your customer and address their concerns. This can make them become more loyal to your brand, which can in turn help your business stay afloat and well-regarded in the eyes of the community.
4. It Spans Beyond Territories
Another fantastic aspect of inbound numbers is that they’re fairly easy to contact regardless of your and your customer’s location in Australia.
Typically, making a call beyond your local area code comes with a higher toll fee, which can put off customers from contacting you if they’re based in another region.
Unless you’re dealing with high-ticket items, your customers will most likely be fine with stomaching their concerns and simply choosing not to deal with your business again.
With an inbound number, however, calls made to your office are charged the local toll fee. This means that, assuming your office is based in Sydney, callers from Melbourne won’t be charged extra for calling beyond their local area code.
This useful feature helps eliminate the geographical barrier for customers reaching out to your business. It also allows your business to set up multiple bases of operation across Australia and have one centralised calling point.
This means that you can hire remote talent to handle your customer inquiry operations, allowing you to tap into a wider pool of qualified candidates to handle your customer service operations.
5. Comes with Useful Data Insights
An inbound number isn’t just a number. It’s a comprehensive system that can track customer behaviour and agent performance.
These data points and metrics help you glean some insights into trends and patterns that your customers tend to gravitate towards, as well as the effectiveness of your agents in their ability to handle customer calls.
These bits of information can help you make informed adjustments to your overall operations. For instance, if you notice that your team’s average resolution time is higher than average, you can create a new plan of action to improve their time and increase the company’s productivity.
Moreover, your customer data can also be used to profile your customers and their general behaviour. With it, you can identify which of your offerings are most popular, which demographics enjoy your business the most, and what times are busiest for inquiries.
6. Promotes Scalability in a Cost-Effective Package
An inbound number might seem like a costly business investment that could significantly impact your cash flow, but that’s not the case. It’s a fairly affordable and practical addition to any small Australian business.
For one, inbound numbers come in different pricing plans. This means that any business organisation, even a small one, can find a plan that best suits their needs and budget.
Secondly, investing in an inbound number also means you don’t have to spend extra on hardware and recurring phone bills to scale your business communications.
With an inbound number, you can scale your operations seamlessly and affordably. It’s a resource you can leverage throughout all phases of your operations, making it an ideal tool to enhance and streamline business communications.
We hope this article has helped you understand the benefits of an inbound number!
