Becoming an entrepreneur is a liberating and lucrative experience that you can pursue. But, it doesn't come without its difficulties.
One of the most prominent is communicating with clients from your personal phone, which carries a number of concerns with it. Adding a second line for business can resolve these issues, but not everyone knows how to tell if the time is right for them to do so.
Not quite sure how to begin? We’ve got all the info you need. Let's explore everything you should keep in mind.
Table of Contents
1. You Need to Reduce Your Overall Stress
3. You Need Solitude After Business Hours
5. Your Company Is Rapidly Scaling
6. You Frequently Communicate With Clients
1. You Need to Reduce Your Overall Stress
One of the most common reasons entrepreneurs choose to add a business line to their phones is to reduce the stress of running a company. When all of your business-related calls and texts intertwine with the content on your personal device, it can quickly take a toll on your mental health.
It's highly likely that your phone will be constantly ringing, vibrating, and receiving texts from unknown numbers asking about your product or service. To help streamline these obligations, you can separate them entirely with an additional phone line.
This will ensure that you keep your personal life completely isolated from your business, something that's difficult to do if you spend too long communicating with your personal phone number.
2. You Need More Utility
As your business contacts list begins to grow, it becomes more and more tiresome to type messages by hand. For entrepreneurs who have a particularly extensive contacts list, this becomes impractical.
Adding a business line will give you far greater utility when it comes to how you communicate with your audience. For example, you'll be able to automate messages and send them from your business number once certain conditions have been met.
This is something that is often impossible to manually complete, such as texting a customer a confirmation number immediately after their purchase and then providing them with updated shipping info.
3. You Need Solitude After Business Hours
As previously mentioned, the stress of running a business can easily become overwhelming once you begin to receive a high volume of communication from your audience. Unfortunately, the solitude that you want to enjoy after your workday can easily become interrupted by business calls and texts.
By adding a second line, you'll be able to have full control over what type of interactions that you deal with after your business hours have been included. Afterward, you can pick up where you left off at the beginning of the next workday.
It's also important to know that you can choose to browse the texts you receive in order to prepare a response later on. Since your audience won't expect a response until your business opens it again, you don't have to feel compelled to reply right away.
4. Privacy Is a Concern
As you might expect, providing clients and customers with your personal phone number isn't a good idea. This type of communication can easily become invasive, and people may begin to feel a bit too comfortable with you once they know that they have your personal phone number.
Additionally, a disgruntled customer or even a malicious competitor can use your personal information with ill intentions.
To help protect yourself in anticipation of these scenarios, it's recommended to add a business line to your phone whenever you begin to feel that your privacy is at risk as a result of your business.
5. Your Company Is Rapidly Scaling
As a business grows, so does the volume of client interactions that you'll have to deal with. If your business is growing at a rapid pace, this can be a difficult challenge to overcome.
For instance, let's assume that you own a small local athletic apparel company. After sponsoring a popular marathon runner in your city, your business begins to get a notable amount of traction. Calls and texts come flooding in, and you're having a hard time keeping up with the increased notoriety.
In this scenario, using your personal phone number as your primary form of contact is not recommended. There's a high chance that you won't be able to provide your clients with the information they need, and you could even overlook an inquiry completely.
6. You Frequently Communicate With Clients
Eventually, you may reach a point where you personally communicate with a handful of clients. In the early stages of your company, it's practical to use your personal phone number for this situation since you're only dealing with a small number of people.
Once you get into regular contact with many different clients, however, it's highly beneficial to move these conversations to a separate business line. Not only will this help remove clutter from your personal device, but you'll also avoid unnecessary confusion as your business contacts accumulate.
For example, you may end up with multiple clients named 'Adam' in addition to the three people named Adam, that you know personally. Segmenting your contacts in this manner will ensure that you are in the right mindset when communicating with each of them.
Deciding to Add a Second Line Can Seem Complicated
But the above information will make the process far smoother. From here, you’ll be able to ensure that the choice you make about adding a second line for your business is right for you.
Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to reach out to us today and see how we can help.
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