It can be easy to use your cell phone for business calls—after all, it’s right there in your pocket! However, there are a number of reasons you might want to reconsider that decision. Here are five practical reasons why you might want to stop using your personal cell phone for business calls.
1. Screening Your Calls? You Might Miss Out on Opportunities
If your cell phone is anything like ours, you probably get a lot of robocalls, and screening your calls can be a great way to avoid having to talk to a telemarketer. However, if your personal phone doubles as your business phone it also means that you’re likely to miss a call from a customer. That runs the risk of losing sales or damaging customer relationships.
2. Your Voicemail Might Get Too Crowded
Another disadvantage to using your personal cell phone for personal and business calls is that your voicemail can get overcrowded. From telemarketer calls you haven’t erased yet to messages from your kids, there are a wide variety of messages you might receive and keep for personal use. However, that overstuffed voicemail could also make it harder to answer messages from customers in a timely fashion.
And speaking of voicemail…
3. Your Personal Voicemail Message is Likely to be Different From Your Business One
Your voicemail message is a great chance to promote products, let customers know about upcoming holiday hours, and more. However, you could be missing out on that promotional opportunity if you’re using your personal phone.
4. It’s Important to Know Who You’re Talking To When You Answer
Think about the many different ways you can answer the phone. If you get a phone call from an unknown number, you might assume the person on the other end of the line is a telemarketer and your tone might reflect that. If that phone call is, instead, from a customer using a different phone than usual, that tone could start that conversation on the wrong foot.
5. On Your Personal Phone You Can’t Share Responsibility for the Line
When your call volume gets heavy or when you’re unable to take a call, it’s nice to have another person take a call. However, when your customers use your personal phone number, it’s much harder to hand the phone off if you’re unable to take the call.
How do you make the most of the telephone at your personalized print business? We would love to see you join the conversation in the comments below.
I’m Sorry, but this Article is definately NOT with the times. Todays cellphones are capable of having multiple numbers and their are several “business line apps” on the market that eliminate the need to use ones private cellphone number for business many of which dont limit the number of voixemails.
Not to mention that business lines also get robocalls and telemarketers.
We have an app through our carrier that fields all of our business calls. When someone calls the business line, a different looking screen will pop up with a different ringtone so we can discern business calls from personal. Whoever has the app installed throughout the company can make and receive calls and the digital answering service directs calls as needed (press 1 for X, press 2 for Y, and so on.) It sure beats us having to carry around 2 phones!