Any of you smaller companies using a cellular phone for doing phone support? I don't exactly run a web hosting business, but was thinking about it (it being cellular phones as a business phone).

My question is how do you guys seperate calls. That is private from business. Or do you use your phone strictly for business? Or do you answer the phone in a professional sense when you don't recognize the phone number?

You can order a caller ID, set it to display names when the phone is ringing and then if you don't know the caller, its more likely a business call.

Best,

My only phone # that my clients have is my cell phone #. I use it for both private and business calls. (I only host a couple clients that I did web design for, my client calls are usually from ppl looking for design, and few and far between). I work out of my home and didn't want to setup a separate business phone line because if I'm out most of the day (which I usually am since I attend a university, I cannot answer any calls) so the line is useless.

I agree with you there. This is why a lot of people (IMHO) use cellular phones for business. I'm looking into NexTel's (my current provider) option of a second phone line, on the same phone. Right now I have a 1-800 that redirects to my cell and it's hard to distinguish what the call is for (ie business or personal). Thanks for your post.

I use uReach to forward all the calls to whoever is "on-duty", sometimes they are using a cell phone. It's nice because when you answer, you aren't directly connected to the client, it tells you who called, and you can choose to answer, send to voicemail, or hang up. I'm not really sure when you'd use the hang up option :-/

How hard is it to change the number it forwards to?

For example, say I needed to change it 6 times a day. Would it take more than 5 minutes each time?

I use my cellular phone strictly for business and for dedicated purchases home phone.

Hey Rob,

The change is instantaneous. You can also set it up where on x day at y time, z person is called. Or, you can set it up where if the 1st number doesn’t answer, it goes to another, then another. For us, ureach is the perfect solution and then some.

I started out just using my cell phone as a business line but have just added a landline and only use my cell for emergency calls now.

Always answer using your full name
Works for me and my clients agree.

In terms of phone systems...this is how I'm setup:

1) Toll free numbers for voice and fax
2) Toll free number routes to cell phones carried by employees
3) If one employee dosent answer in 30 seconds, call goes to the next
4) Employees often carry to cell phoens - one for work, one for personal.

The annoying thing that we found was tyring to make sure that employees were not using their work cell phones (which we provided) to make personal calls - so there is the added issue of tracking incoming/outgoing calls - the easiest way we found to do this was to simply write a script to import calls from the cell phone providers website, and calculate a percentage of local area code to non-local area codes, anything that showed up too much locally was flagged for manual review (in terms of checking the numebrs to see if they were customers or not).

Of course, this had the extra problem of having to notify all of our employees about this policy and have them sign a statement of acknowledgtment - we were worried about privacy violations and such (was never an issue, we just wanted to make sure).

Asside form that, I've known people who have purchased second phone lines for work calls so that they don't have to use their home telephone number...a cheaper option that some used was to just have distinctive rining setup on their phones and to use voicemail rather than traditional answering machines...

I personally carry two cell phones (work and personal) and have two phone lines comming into my home (one regular for personal, one internet phone setup for work).

To startup, use a cell phone to save you money. When you finally established, make sure you get a work landline phone.