Insights

Toll-Free Today: Seven Uses for a Unique Business Tool

Oct 26, 2015

When Toll-Free Numbers were first introduced in the 1960s, they played the sole role of being a cost-free mechanism for connecting consumers with businesses and organizations. However, throughout the years, their role has evolved to serve a number of strategic functions related to that consumer-business connection.

Toll-Free has become a critical solution or branding, marketing and customer interaction. And it is has grown beyond a voice-centric service to become a multichannel communication platform.

Today, there are more than 40 million Toll-Free Numbers in use, with a new code opening scheduled for 2017. You can call them. You can text them. And they serve many roles beyond basic free-calling services. Let’s explore seven:

A trusted connection between business and consumers: Toll-Free Numbers are reliable, national business numbers. Companies from every industry, including healthcare, communications, travel, education, high-tech, and more offer Toll-Free Numbers to help customers with questions about products or services.

Consumers associate calls made to and received from Toll-Free Numbers with a reputable and trusted source. And text enabling a Toll-Free Number allows an organization to cater to the millions of us who prefer to text over talk, while keeping that same Toll-Free asset as the primary link with their customers.

Integral to branding: A Toll-Free Number remains one of the simplest ways to create branded interactions with a customer base.

Commonly used as tools in branding and marketing campaigns, the use of vanity numbers can define corporate identity as well. Vanity phone numbers are easy to remember, which encourages repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing.

Sales and support: While email and texting have become important in both personal and business communication, customers tend to pick up the phone when they are farther along in the buying process.

Often, a phone call suggests the caller is closer to making a purchasing decision. For service-type businesses, a phone call might mean the customer has a complex issue or question, or the call could be a follow-up to a text conversation via an SMS-enabled Toll-Free Number. No matter what the context, at the end of the day, phone calls are still important drivers of sales and business-to-customer interactions.

With that said, Toll-Free can also drive a text conversation. And for many consumers, that means a more convenient way to interact with a company. Over a text enabled Toll-Free Number, they can check a status, troubleshoot an issue, schedule an appointment and even place an order. 

Valuable marketing analytics: The fastest growing segment of how people use Toll-Free is ad tracking and marketing.

Toll-Free Numbers can be embedded into online and offline ads. When consumers respond to these numbers, the advertiser can track consumer response information related to the respective ad. Businesses gain better insight into call volumes, trends and patterns.

Take a realtor, who advertises his services using billboards, print ads and online ads—with a different Toll-Free Number assigned to each. All three numbers, however, are routed to one central calling center. Analytics determine the channel that is generating the majority of calls. Such data allows the realtor to re-allocate his marketing spend to the most effective channel.

Non-geographic number: Businesses can have one number to reach departments that may be geographically distributed.

For anyone who has found themselves without flowers in the days before Valentine’s Day, the answer should be on the tip of your tongue: 1-800 Flowers.com®. The company, owned by flower-shop owner Jim McCann, fills its orders through a network of florists and through drop shipments. It also owns a florist-to-florist network and a floral wire service—all routed through the vanity Toll-Free Number.

Location aware routing personalizes localized service delivery: Businesses can provide local services relevant to consumers’ home market.

Remember the days when a receptionist would answer your call? Ruby® Receptionists are a team of virtual receptionists that your business can hire to provide a similar effect. Call a Toll-Free Number and on the other line is a receptionists based in Portland, Ore., but sounds like they are located right in your office. 

Enhanced data: When a customer makes a Toll-Free phone call to a business, the business can access additional analytical data that would not be necessarily available had the customer used a local phone number. Toll-Free Numbers are used by Google on digital click-to-call campaigns. Businesses can access data about the caller’s search history, geographic location, and other helpful statistics.

These are merely a sampling of the ways that Toll-Free Numbers are being used to connect consumers with businesses and organizations today. The next era of Toll-Free growth sets the stage for even more interactive uses.

Michelle Larsen

SVP & Chief Experience Officer