Don’t give anyone else ultimate control over your business.
Building your business on a shared use rented number is like borrowing money from a loan shark or even the mob, to start your business. They may look nice in the beginning like they wouldn’t take advantage of you, but any time you put your business at the mercy of someone else, it creates a bad situation.
Your ability to transfer your toll free number to another phone company is what keeps your current phone company honest, because if they provide bad service you can leave. Or if someone else offers a cheaper service you can leave. It’s not that you have to leave, but that ability to select a different provider is what keeps your current provider competitive.
When you share or rent someone else’s number, you don’t get the ability to transfer your number because it’s NOT your number. (Ironically one of the worst, most loan shark like shared use companies out there is MyTollFreeNumber.com because it’s THEIR toll free number not yours.) And when you take the ability to transfer the number away, you remove the incentive to keep the price low, the providers natural desire to make as much money as they can automatically creeps in, especially after you’ve advertised their number.
The same thing is true for providing good service. How many monopolies provide good service? If you don’t have any choice but to use them because you’ve spent a lot of money advertising their number which you can’t take anywhere else, what are you going to do if they aren’t helpful?
It may seem smart to borrow money from a loan shark since they’re the only ones with some particular number and you’ll make so much more money with that magic number that you can afford their higher interest rates. But in the end putting your business at someone else’s mercy is never a good idea no matter how much better you think THEIR number is or how nice they make their website or the contract look.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely at TollFreeNumbers.com says:
September 15, 2010 at 1:32 pm
[...] and Shared Use in general. I think this one phrase sums up the biggest problem with shared use. When you advertise someone else’s number you give them Absolute Control over your advertising, because you can’t just change the phone number in your advertising. That means they don’t [...]