Can You Keep Your Phone Number When Moving to Cloud Communications?
Your phone number may be pretty important to you. Maybe it’s even part of your jingle, or perhaps you’ve got a catchy number combination that fits your brand perfectly. When moving to cloud communications, you may wonder what will happen to your trusty seven digits.
Cloud communications offers a host of benefits, including built-in redundancy during a disaster, scalability for growth and flexibility, considerable cost savings, and more. If you’re somewhat interested in these advantages, but holding out because there’s a nagging concern about your phone number, you can set that aside. Here’s what you need to know about keeping your phone number:
Number Porting is a common practice and is standard when switching to cloud communications. It can be applied to not just your main voice line, but also to other numbers:
- Local voice lines
- Fax numbers
- Wireless numbers
- Toll-free voice lines
The Cost of number porting may also be a concern. You’ll need to decide whether number porting is worth the expense. To best make this determination, find out in advance whether your provider will charge for this service and the time that will be involved. In many cases, businesses have to set up a temporary number while their numbers are being ported.
There are several reasons why you may decide the time and fees are worth porting numbers:
- Your number is part of your brand identity. Like mentioned above, it may spell out part of your brand name or it may repeat a single digit in the last four numbers that helps customers remember you.
- You’ve invested a lot in your phone number. It’s splashed all over billboards across town and you have it printed on everything from business cards and travel mugs to the sides of your fleet of work trucks.
- You’re worried about alienating customers with a new number. If you’re concerned customers may not take the trouble to Google you or they’ll easily bail out when they reach your previous number that’s now been disconnected, porting may be worth the cost.
Transferring a phone number from a traditional landline to cloud communications isn’t as difficult as it once was, but it requires time and an investment. Talk with your cloud provider to get an accurate estimate of porting costs and timeframe.
The decision of whether to port your numbers is just a small part of a migration that introduces countless benefits to your business. Contact us at Precision Interconnect to discuss the advantages cloud communications brings to your company.
