What is a virtual phone number and how does it work?
With a virtual phone number your teams are no longer tied to their desks and you can build a local presence anywhere. Get yours today.
A virtual phone number is an effective way to futureproof your business communications. In the past, businesses had no choice but to rely on landline-based phone systems and traditional phone numbers. Those numbers, as a result, were directly tied to a specific physical location—or, latterly, to a particular device, in the case of a business mobile number.
With virtual phone numbers, those shackles are off, and the potential benefits for your business are almost boundless. Before we get to those, however, let’s cover the basics.
What is a virtual phone number?
A virtual telephone number—sometimes also known as an online phone number, digital phone number, or internet phone number—is one that doesn’t rely on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). That’s what most of us would call the traditional landline-based telephony network.
Instead, virtual numbers rely on different technology entirely. They, as part of a virtual phone service like that offered by RingCentral, utilize Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Calls to and from virtual numbers are transmitted over an internet connection rather than copper wires or fiber optic cabling.
What that means is that virtual phone numbers are not exclusively tied to a specific phone or device. As long as a user has an internet connection and their communications software or app, they can make and take calls via their virtual phone number. This gives businesses and their workforce more flexibility in how and where they make and receive calls.
How does a virtual phone number for business work?
A virtual business phone number is one of the components of a virtual phone service. VoIP is the telephony technology that underpins those services.
In a nutshell, VoIP is what lets you take and make phone calls over the internet. Your voice gets transformed at one end of the call into digital data packets. Those packets are then transported—in the same way as an email or other digital communication—over the internet to the call’s recipient. The packets are then reformed into audio at the other end—all essentially instantaneously.
Much like traditional phone numbers, virtual numbers determine where the calls go. With the greater technicalities handled by your virtual phone service provider, that’s really all you need to know about how virtual telephone numbers work.
What’s more interesting are the types of business virtual phone number available and how online phone numbers could benefit you.
Types of virtual phone numbers
Aside from the technology behind them, virtual or VoIP phone numbers are very similar to the traditional alternative. So much so, you can get all the same types of numbers, whether they’re virtual or related to a traditional phone system.
Local virtual phone numbers
That means a virtual telephone number could look like a local phone number. For example, in the same way as a standard US landline number, it could have a three-digit area code at the start denoting a particular part of the country.
What’s different with an online phone number—and what makes it great for businesses looking to establish local presences around the country—is that you don’t have to have a physical address in that area to get and use a local number.
If you choose RingCentral as your virtual phone number provider, you can choose from over 200 area codes for your number. Some of the area codes available include:
Toll-free virtual phone numbers
Virtual phone numbers can be toll-free numbers, too, and utilize the same toll-free prefixes as traditional landlines. In the USA, the most popular is 800, closely followed by the likes of 888, 877, 866, 855, and 844.
Alternatives to virtual phone numbers and their main differences
If you’re a business looking to invest in your phone-based communications, there are two main alternatives to virtual phone numbers and the systems that provide them:
Landline-based numbers and systems
Before the advent of virtual phone numbers, all business phone systems used landlines and on-premises hardware. These types of systems involve copper wires (the physical phone line) connecting business phones to the PSTN.
With a landline-based setup, business numbers are directly connected to a single geographic location. You can invest in multi-line phone systems for greater flexibility but these systems are still much more limited than the virtual, VoIP-based alternative.
Cell phone numbers and contracts
Some businesses also invest in cell phone contracts for their teams and employees. That gives them more mobility than a landline-based system and is useful for traveling salespeople and others who are on the road a lot.
Cell phone numbers, however, are still linked to a particular mobile phone, device, or SIM card. You can’t quickly and easily access the same number and a full suite of communications features on any device, in the same way as you can with a virtual phone system.
How to get a virtual phone number
It’s surprisingly quick and easy to get a virtual phone number. Unlike traditional phone numbers that need new telephone wires to be installed which could take days or weeks and be very expensive.
In fact, you’ll often get a free virtual phone number when you subscribe to a plan from virtual phone system providers.
Getting additional numbers is also typically straightforward. From the online administrator account of their cloud-based software, businesses can buy a phone number online and assign it as a company phone number or to an individual user.
If you want to keep your previous phone number—if it’s been associated with your company for a long time, for instance—that’s not a problem, either.
Most virtual phone service providers allow new subscribers to port their old business phone numbers from their traditional providers. That means you can combine the benefits of new, free phone numbers and that old contact number your customers recognize and trust.
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Business benefits of a virtual phone number
There are a whole host of benefits of getting a virtual phone number for small businesses and enterprises alike. In short, it could help you:
- Better connect your workforce across multiple business locations
- Enable you to support remote and hybrid working arrangements
- Provide access to the best talent around the world
- Easily track the performance of marketing campaigns and other activities
- Establish local presences in different areas or countries
- Protect your personal number and privacy
Unite your distributed workforce with a single business phone number
For businesses that operate in multiple locations, it’s difficult to communicate and collaborate efficiently with a traditional phone system.
What usually happens is that each location has its own phone system from different providers, which are typically not compatible with each other. This results in a disconnect between the different workforces of each location.
A modern business phone service with virtual phone numbers, however, is able to unite distributed staff from multiple locations.
Using the cloud PBX component of your internet phone service, you can set it up so that calls reach the right destination regardless of location. Employees who are not even in the office can still be reached as long as they are connected to the business phone system via the internet.
Your business can also set up teams or departments under a single virtual phone number. By assigning a phone number to a department, you can set up a call queue where all incoming calls can be routed to all members of the department simultaneously or in chronological order. For instance, you can use the call queue features to distribute calls among available team members if you want your entire support team to handle every incoming call collectively.
There are so many options available to use virtual phone numbers for uniting your distributed workforce that are not available with traditional lines. Collaborative features like conference calling highlighted by consistent call quality, too, make a virtual system an even more efficient business calling solution.
Provide your business remote work capabilities
Another benefit of using virtual phone numbers through a virtual phone service is that it allows organizations to offer their employees flexible and remote working options.
Since a virtual phone number can be accessed from anywhere, employees can do their job from anywhere—their home, a coffee shop, the beach. What’s more, they’ll be able to use call management tools such as call forward, call transfer, call blocking, and custom call rules, auto-replies, which can be set around your business hours.
This setup also allows your employees to explore opportunities for the business outside the office without worrying about missing a call or being unable to use the company phone number.
Moreover, it opens up the option of implementing BYOD (bring your own device) policies. Such policies can save your business money in terms of device provisioning while giving your employees the ability to use the company number to call, send and receive texts, and even virtually fax from their personal phones. This removes the need for them to carry multiple mobile devices for communication.
Give your business access to the best talent all over the world
Since your business can now offer remote work options, you can expand your talent search exponentially. You can look for the best employees around the US—and even the world—even if they cannot physically come to your office’s location.
You can simply have them work remotely, from their home. They will still have access to official business phone numbers and the company phone system as long as they’re connected to the internet. Imagine the productivity boost with the best talent from around the world contributing to your organization.
Allow your business to measure performance using your virtual phone numbers
You can also use your virtual phone numbers to measure the success of your sales and marketing campaigns.
By associating specific phone numbers to campaigns, you can easily measure how many calls, inquiries, and leads the campaign is generating.
Companies like RingCentral offer unlimited extensions to support large-scale campaigns. What’s more, you can integrate your communications platform seamlessly with RingSense for Sales, to reap all the benefits of AI-powered conversation intelligence.
You can also use virtual telephone numbers to run market tests and see patterns that can be useful to your business.
For example, if you ran an ad in multiple cities, you may discover that your business is getting more calls from a particular city like Los Angeles compared to another city like New York. From there, you can investigate further and make the necessary changes to improve performance.
Establish local presences in different areas or countries
Another of the most useful virtual phone number use cases is to help businesses establish themselves in new areas and countries.
Virtual phone numbers aren’t tied to a particular geographic location. That means you can get local or international numbers to serve areas where you don’t actually have an office or premises.
That’s great if your business needs or wants to expand to new audiences without the expense of physically moving there. You can simply get a new number from your VoIP provider and start using it to reach out to your new customers.
When you do, you’re more likely to get a positive response. People are more likely to trust numbers they recognize, so pickup rates of calls from local numbers are generally higher.
Protect your personal number and privacy
You probably want to be available to your team, customers, and important stakeholders as often as possible. However, you likely also don’t want everyone under the sun to have your personal number.
Virtual phone numbers can help you satisfy both. With a virtual number, you can forward calls from important contacts to your cell, without sharing the personal number.
In fact, with the right provider you can access the full functionality of your virtual phone systems from whichever device you like.
Potential limitations—particularly with the wrong virtual phone number provider
It should be clear by now that virtual phone numbers can offer a lot of business benefits. However, it’s also worth keeping in mind the potential risks, limitations, and challenges.
Free virtual phone number challenges
If you choose to get a virtual phone number free of charge from a provider like TextNow or TextFree, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:
- Limited feature set - You’re getting your virtual phone number for free, so you shouldn’t expect any bells or whistles. The ability to call and text is about as good as it gets, and even then you may be limited in terms of minutes and messages.
- Device dependent - Free virtual phone numbers can sometimes only be usable on mobile devices. That’s as compared to a virtual number from RingCentral which you can use on smartphones, tablets, desktops, laptops—pretty much any device you like.
- Reassignment - Sometimes, free virtual phone numbers get reassigned by their providers to a paying customer instead. That’s not ideal if you’ve started to rely on the number and your own customers have begun recognizing it as yours.
Virtual phone number reputation
While virtual phone numbers are used by a huge number of entirely reputable businesses, they’re also favored by a small number of fraudsters.
If you suspect a virtual number is being used for nefarious purposes, there are a few options for tracing its owner:
- Reverse phone number lookup - There are a number of tools available online into which you can enter a phone number and attempt to find its owner.
- CNAM (Caller ID Name) lookup - If you have a VoIP number, you can also contact your provider and ask them to perform a CNAM lookup. Providers hold these names in their databases and it’s a lot more difficult for virtual phone number subscribers to fake them than it is for the caller ID that may show up when they call you.
A virtual phone number can make a very real difference for your business
The above are just some of the things you can do with virtual phone numbers and are among the many reasons why virtual phone systems are considered the best business phone service for small businesses.
Far more than a free phone number app, RingCentral delivers the advanced features of enterprise-level phone systems with the flexibility and mobility of web-based tools—all for affordable prices.
By signing up for a RingCentral account, you can also benefit from its partnerships like the one it has with Snap Recordings, which allows you to request custom, professional greetings. Add a slick call menu system into the mix and you’ll make a killer first impression that results in happy customers.