Warning: spent $95 on a second business line and it saved my whole weekend
Last month I split my shop's phone line off my home number and I was kicking myself about the cost at first, $95 to set it up plus about $22 a month. We run a small print business out of the garage here in Boise and I had been giving out my cell number on every invoice for two years. The problem was I could never tell if a call was a real customer or my kid's school, so I started letting stuff ring. After the switch I got a separate number with a voicemail greeting that says our hours, and in the first week I caught three orders I would have missed because they came in after 6pm and I just checked the messages the next morning. The thing that really got me was the caller ID app that came with it, since it shows the business name so folks know it's not a spam call. I also set up call forwarding so when I'm at the printer it goes straight to my cell without me giving out the real number. It's not fancy, no big system, just one extra line, but for a two person operation it made a bigger difference than the $300 in ads I tried last spring. Anyone else paying for a second line, or do you just use one number and live with the mess?