best phone line/tips

amother

Sun, Nov 24 2013, 7:36 pm

I am setting up a home based professional practice. I need a dedicated high quality phone line that will be private, confidential, and separate so that no one else in the house could mistakenly pick up the phone or see caller id or anything like that. It also has to be free for clients to call me. Some people recommend vonage or an 800 number or a cell phone. I think landlines may offer better quality in terms of sound and also need to look into headsets. Also, it seems there are all sorts of different prices for 800 numbers etc. I'm not so tech savvy either.

Any recommendations? Any success stories? I know people must have already done this and don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Thanks so much!

Wishing everyone much success in every way!

TwinsMommy

Sun, Nov 24 2013, 7:41 pm

I had an 800 line for a while but it was too costly for my purposes. My clients didn't care about calls to me being free--- my long distance clients mostly order online and email me, so since my primary business isn't terribly phone based, I nixed the 800 line. When I'm calling new clients who I don't necessarily want to have my home phone number yet, I call from my cell.

Will all of your clients be local? If so an 800 line is un-necessary. If your clients are all over and your business is very phone based, an 800 line might be worth it for you.

TwinsMommy

Sun, Nov 24 2013, 8:06 pm

for life coaching you're likely to have long conversations. I wonder if a $20 a month webinar service would serve you better, especially since people will be calling in from other countries? It would be free for your clients to meet you on the webinar, and a setup fee plus $20 a month for you to set up your webinar service. The only thing is that for the more inexpensive webinar services you can't have hundreds of people calling in at once-- but for life coaching I assume you're one on one. Additionally your clients will need their microphones to work. You might have some people with tech issues on their end if they don't know how to turn on their mic. I'm an affiliate for one of the services, if you decide to check it out I can hook you up- pm me. I would also say skype but I don't know if you can record calls with skype and I assume your calls need to be recorded.

A benefit of a webinar service is while you're both talking you can both turn on your cams and see each other, plus you can write on the whiteboard or show a document from your computer as you speak.