Sometimes people ask if we can do any better for them on the pricing. I understand that everyone wants a deal but I don’t think it’s fair to give different prices any more than I think it’s fair to treat certain people better than others. If someone is willing to play games with the price, what else are they willing to play games with? Are they giving some people bigger discounts than they’re giving you? If you didn’t ask for a discount would it have been fair for us to charge you more?

The truth is, that we’re too big to operate like a flea market table or a garage sale. We’re not big yet, not are we too big to have everyone making up their own prices. We’re also the only organization in the vanity number business with straight forward upfront prices. Everyone else makes up the price depending on how much they think t customer can afford or how badly they want it. They negotiate with people all the time. But they’re starting at 10 times our most expensive type of number or more.

We have to run this business as a business, not a garage sale.

Only paying for results means we don’t get paid unless we get you the number we want. One of the biggest differences between us and large phone companies is that we’re accountable in everything we do. If we don’t get it for you, we certainly don’t charge you for it.

We're real people and we're reachable and accountable

Whenever you’re successful there are always a few people trying to tear you down. And unfortunately when you’re honest and open with people it gives them even more of a target to shoot at. This is especially true on the internet where some people love to say vicious things about other people just for fun. Add to that the fact that I give people my honest opinion about companies and point out negative things that go on within the industry and you’re gonna get a few stones thrown at you.

When you're honest and up front and successful you become a target

At first glance we might look like we’re selling or brokering numbers but when you look beneath the surface our business model is more like GoDaddy’s than a domain name broker. We do a better job helping people find good numbers and only charge a flat fee for the searching and activating that number. The fee isn’t based on the value of the number, the amount of advertising the customer does or how badly they need the number. (Those are all things that brokers or any of the toll free number squatters do.)

Over 90% of the numbers we get for customers are just a $49 one time fee. We do have some numbers that take more time and effort to get, such as premium numeric numbers and disconnected 800 numbers. But even those which can be quite valuable at times, are just a slightly higher flat fee based on the area code for disconnected numbers or the star level for premium numbers.

Read the rest of this article if you want to contact us about selling an 800 number

Why don’t we do what they do? Someone asked me this recently and it made me think a little. I’ve always been glad to be a little different. I have a different business model than any other toll free service. But WHY are we so different? We’re different for a number of reasons but part of the reason is because we think there’s an inherent conflict when you have the same people providing the ongoing service, which they want to keep doing and at the same time insuring your ability to transfer the number.

The best phone companies drag their feet and do a lousy job at releasing numbers because they are losing a customer. The worst ones claim the number was part of their service so you can cancel their service but you can’t take their number with you if you want to leave or even that it’s just their number and you were renting it, so they can rent it to your competitor if they want to. Ones in between will claim it’s “their” number and charge you up to $200 to take “their” number with you.

The real question is how can a phone company protect the customer’s ability to chose their phone company if their incentive is to keep you there as long as possible. To me getting someone honestly on your side, NOT trying to sell you something is really the best thing we offer and well worth way more than the $49 one time fee we charge for that.

We’re adding more about the people behind our service in the about us section. Most about us pages are designed to make the organization sound big and impressive (almost aloof?) without really saying anything at all about anyone. Our about us section is the opposite of that, written to show you that we’re a very small organization of real people and to show you as much about us as possible. We’re small and we love being small, blowing the doors off of the big companies at finding good numbers for our customers and being able to do it from the kitchen table, the hammock chair or out by the pool.

Read more about Bill and the whole team behind TollFreeNumbers.com

No, this isn’t a sale on I-phones. It’s a Special Sale for Free 800 Numbers for residents of any I-state (Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, and Idaho). We’re giving our service away for free 800 numbers, (a $50 value) to any resident of those four states because we really want to help the victims of the Midwest flooding and their whole community.

We always try to have interesting sales that resonate and make a difference and our hearts go out to everyone victimized and affected by these devastating floods. So we feel this is a way that we can do our small part, doing what we do best, to help the economy in those states. This is limited to the first 1,000 activations or 30 days (until July 18th). I-state residents should just enter “ISTATE” as the coupon code at checkout. Regular Activations from residents that don’t use the coupon code will also be refunded until July 18th too.

Toll free numbers are actually important disaster recovery tools. They definitely help flood victims or anyone that has to be evacuated by making it easier for them to redirect their calls even when their buildings and regular phone lines are down.

Please help us help as many people as possible!

If you know anyone in an “I state” tell them to go to TollFreeNumbers.com and search for available 800 numbers. We want to get them a FREE 1-800 number that matches their business name or advertising so their calls can follow them anywhere. And if your business hasn’t been flooded think about how a memorable number can not only increase the response to all your advertising but it could keep your business open if you ever have to evacuate or change your operation suddenly.

You can get meat at a high quality butcher shop or at a Walmart superstore. Walmart is efficient, but they’re trying to be everything for everybody. So you can’t expect the cashier at Walmart to know as much about seasoning and preparing the meat or to be able to help you get a good piece of meat as the butchers in the butcher shop, where they work with nothing but the meat all day long and have for years.

If you know what you’re doing with meat and what to look for, you can use Walmart. But if you don’t know that much about meat or what you’re looking for that’s when it’s definitely worth the trip to go to someone that really knows meat. If it’s important to your business go to the specialist. And the front door to all of your new business is generally important.

Sometimes people think that because someone works for a big company, they must have a lot of training. Unfortunately that’s not the case, and even the newest butcher knows way more about meat than anyone at Walmart. So don’t take advice about meat from the stock boy at Walmart. And if you do, don’t go back to the butcher and ask him why some nameless and unaccountable cashier at Walmart said to do something different than the owner of the Butcher shop.

We are extending the free temporary service for any customers that activated numbers recently in Southern California. So many people there have had their lives uprooted or interrupted, that we wanted to do our small part to make sure they didn’t get their service interrupted too. The temporary service is still temporary, but the 30 days will start again today automatically. If you have any question or issue related to this (or anything really) please feel free to call us. Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims of the Califrornia fires and the whole community there.

9/26 to 9/28: Bill and Rita are both attending the Channel Partners show in Secaucus NJ. We have attended this show before and always enjoy seeing so many of the carriers we work with and agents and friends in person. We are also gathering information for our new Provides directory which will be an amazing additon to our site. Unfortunately this may make it harder to reach us during the afternoon from 1pm to 6pm EST on Thursday and Friday morning, but we will take calls as much as possible and of course answer emails into the wee hours of the am (as usual).

We provide a very unique service to our customers and the industry as whole. We’re in the phone business but we’re not a phone company in any traditional sense. We don’t send out phone bills or even charge customers for the small amount of usage we provide with each number. (more…)

I really want to help everyone.  But we’re not the Psychic Phone Network, and when they (intentionally?) remove the previous communication from their email response it make it impossible for us to respond properly.  It’s even worse when they refer to the previous communication! 

I realize they don’t mean to be difficult or rude.  I guess they just don’t realize how many people we talk to about the same issues.  They have no trouble understanding what they’re responding too because they weren’t asking very many questions about toll free service.  But for us, they’re all about that and often with the same questions.

Sometimes I wish I could just write back “Yes, sure.” or whatever as the answer to their question and remove the question so they would have to ask what I was replying to.  Then I wouldn’t have to say anything because they would see how difficult that makes it to communicate.

But like my mom always said, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”  It’s also wrong to be rude back to people, even if you’re doing it to show them how it feels.

I read an article recently by Sage Lewis on Clickz that said something that struck me as my goal (lofty though it may be) in building and designing our new website. (more…)

If you’ve looked at almost anything on our website, TollFreeNumbers.com you’ve probably already seen some of our thousand plus customer testimonials. We really appreciate them more than we probably would in a big company, because they are from our work, not someone else in the company. Anyway, because of recent announcement and policy changes at Google we were recently told that we really had to change the links in our testimonials.

Our goal in everything we do is to maximize the benefit to the customer and that was part of our thinking with the testimonials too. But Google has made several announcements regarding paid links and link farms etc. Some experts also told us that although we’ve had the best intentions, these testimonials will appear to the Google bots like a link farm or at least will cause some decrease in our credibility if we’re linking to customer websites that aren’t related to ours at all and/or are of a low quality or in a bad neighborhood. Linking to anyone who pays you for a link without any disclosure is frowned on by the Search Engine gods and possibly even the FCC in some circumstances.

The solution was to add NO FOLLOW tags to the links. The link is still visible and still provides many of the benefits, for many of the search engines. See Joe Whyte’s article about No Follow tags and their effect on search engines: http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/blog/2007/05/do-nofollow-tags-really-pass-link-love.html

Heres what Joe Whyte at Search Marketing Standard says in summarizing nofollow tags:

1. They are good for getting a site crawled
2. They are good for helping a overall inbound links
3. They assist in search saturation
4. They can help pass relevancy
5. They are stupid and I hate them
6. They give people a sense of security which really is not there
7. Not many people use these correctly
8. I think if it would be up to us to help determine link value, someone should start a conference about it
9. I don’t think you can rank for competitive terms with just nofollow links
10. I think search engines pay attention to nofollows, to what degree is unsure

We never promoted the testimonial links as anything other than what they are and are supposed to be. We don’t want anyone to write a testimonial just because of the link. We don’t write them or tell them what to say at all. We only want people to write what they honestly feel and would say to someone else about us. It’s still beneficial to our customer’s sites, but the No Follow tags protect us from looking like some type of link farm and keeps the system honest and safer for us to do.

If you email use asking if a number is available, we may answer you, but we’ll usually just refer you back to the lookup tools on our site. We’re not doing that because we’re lazy or trying to be short with you, but simply because once you realize how amazingly simple it is to use, you’ll be able to do dozens of queries in less time than it takes us to do one for you with the same tools you have available right over the web. We do this because we really do want to be helpful. We’re not trying to brush you off, we’re really just trying to help you not only get the answer to that question but your next questions too.

We also have to work efficiently, often long hours, just to keep up with the volume of inquiries we get. We are here to help you, but it’s really not helping anyone to make you dependent on us. We’ve made the very best tools available to you right over the net, to empower you. That’s what the web is supposed to be about, putting the power at your finger tips 24 hours a day. So try the tools yourself. If you have a question about what something means or need something you can’t find on the web, we’ll be happy to answer you. That’s because unlike other web services, there are real people here that know this business, available to help you. But please respect our time enough not to ask us to do something you can do quicker and easier yourself.

I always try to be helpful to visitors to our business or website, especially when people call with difficult issues for a toll free number. However that doesn’t mean that I can necessarily solve your problem or even tell you how to do it.

If it’s a number that we got you, I certainly feel we have more of an obligation. But callers need to realize that as much as I do want to help I really don’t get paid for solving most problems. And offering to pay me for my time is nice but there’s ultimately no mechanism for that, nor should there be. We really try to help customers because I believe what goes around comes around.

We’re always happy to help callers but some callers really need to understand that there’s a difference between being helpful and expecting me to guide you the whole way through their situation. I often find that after I give someone some advice I wind up with call after call, where they tell me everything that they did and were told so I can tell them what to do next, every step of the way. Like I said I want to help everyone as much as possible, and I like to hear the outcome of a difficult situation too. But you also have to respect our time at times too.

Some people seem to operate entirely under the assumption that what they are trying to do absolutely has to be possible. Unfortunately everything is clearly NOT possible and as difficult as that may be to face, it is ultimately easier to face that than to pursue something endlessly. Sometimes persistence means backing off on it right now and trying it again in three months. That often allows you to gain some perspective and proves to other people that you are persistent without being obnoxious or belligerent.

You might also get a way to follow up with an agent by just sending a thank you card and then a Christmas Card. You’d be surprised how few customer service representatives ever get Christmas Cards and how much more that will make them want to help you. You don’t have to send anything expensive but sending a birthday card will help you cross the line from customer to friend.
There’s another type of question too that we see and we are happy to get these. These are the questions that people call up with just to find out if we’re real. We have to answer their questions but the purpose is really just to make sure we are competent and willing to help them if they need it in the future. It takes a little getting used to, to recognize them but once you do they are very easy to work with. They are easily recognized because they are always the most obvious questions that are clearly answered on the website. It’s often a little frustrating when people ask questions that are clearly answered on our website, but this is a clear exception.

That probably sounds kind of weird and is a little hard to explain sometimes, but we all have things happen and pressure in our lives. Maybe it’s a flat tire, or having to deal with your health insurance company for something. When something gets me really annoyed I kind of like getting lots of customer calls. I think it’s because this is my thing, and I can answer most calls without really thinking very hard. It’s sort of relaxing and has become my routine or my comfort zone.

I don’t know if it’s good to admit this or not, but last summer I enjoyed being able to lay out on the deck and found that I can answer the phone and jump from call to call laying in the sun without even opening my eyes. Some things require changing things in the computer so I might have to get up and go back to the computer for some things.

I think it’s also because half of the callers, especially the new potential sales are calling to ask a question or two, but really just want to find out if you’re real, or if this sounds safe and someone or an organization they want to work with. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t think voicemail is good for sales, because customers don’t want to just give you their information. They usually want to ask a question or two to make sure they’re comfortable.

Just keep that in mind, especially when you end the call. Your sales may go way up, by just adding a little more happiness in your voice at the end of the call, and that will also wind up making YOU feel better too. You can’t help but feel good, if you really feel like you’re helping people and they really appreciate your service.

The definition of Good Customer Service is, not letting it bother you when the customer yells at you or sends emails with a font size of 24 or more. (Even when the problem is their fault!)

~Rita (DaleCarnegie) Thorn
In all seriousness the customer service at most phone companies today is attrotious.  The good news is that all we have to do is be there and try to help them when we answer the phone and we’re already in the top half of telecom companies in terms of customer service.  Being small means you don’t reach someone in a third world country, you talk to the people that run the company, know what they’re doing, and have the ability and willingness to fix things.

Unfortunately that’s not common in most phone companies any more.  The good news is that this means there is a need and a place for us.  People often ask how come their phone company takes so long to process things and can’t find the same numbers and do the same things we can.  The truth is that they could.  But the truth is that they also do such a lousy job at it that they make us look good too.

This isn’t a knock on big phone companies.  It’s just what tends to happen to any organization as it gets big.  That’s also why we don’t provide the ongoing service, because we don’t want to get too big.  We know our niche and our strength and we want to do a great job in this niche.  Bigger isn’t always better, and in terms of customer service and actually getting things done, it’s usually smaller that’s really the best, at least in my experience.

Rita and I were having this discussion recently about who are competitors are. A customer had told us how someone he called a competitor of ours was putting us down. The customer was great and of course the comments only made the guy making the comments look bad to the customer. I appreciated his I told the customer that it really didn’t bother us, because he’s really not a competitor any more at this point.

I used to say that I was a Telenumeric Consultant, and I guess I still am to some degree. But my role has switched from being a consultant to being a vanity number service. I built my business as a consultant and still have that attitude to some degree. I still have the free consultation button on the page and take phone calls personally as much as possible. But I’ve only done one or two consulting type jobs in the past six months. I also get more toll free numbers for my clients per month than any of the other “consultants” do all year. It’s not eve close.

There are still a couple people that think of me as a consultant and I guess it’s natural to try to compare themselves to me or to put me down in order to make themselves look bigger. The more successful you are the more people try to compare themselves to you and the more they try to tear you down. But like I said to the person that thought someone else was a competitor, he’s not a competitor for me any more than a domain name squatter is a competitor to GoDaddy.com.

We’re really only competing with ourselves. What we do is really different than what the regular phone companies do and from any other vanity number broker/squatter. We’re not trying to take business from anyone else, but to fill a need that neither of them are really addressing and to build this niche into a much more widely recognized and understandable market. That’s why we have to provide more information and education and why we have to make it so simple that anyone can easily find and activate a good number for their business.

This is a good question because I’m not any of the above. Technically I am my own phone company and have access to do things that a phone company does being a responsible organization, (abbreviated RespOrg) which basically means I have access into the national SMS/800 database. But I’m not really like a phone company or an enhanced service provider because I’m not trying to sell you the ongoing toll free service.  I just want  help you get the best number and then help you transfer it to the best service for your needs, no matter what company that is. (more…)

We’ve literally invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and worked on this system for many years to help you find a great number for your business.  So if you have any questions or need more help let us know. 

Lastly I want to thank the people that have made and continue to make this tool work, Bud Jay and Ryan Maple.  Their continuous effort over the years has made this the best lookup tool of it’s kind.  Their pictures are in the header at the top of this column and there’s more in the About Us section as well as The brains behind the Lookup.  We also have some exciting things coming that are going to be a quantum leap forward as well too. 

There are several other related issues we could add here too, but this section is already long so I’ve put them into separate posts to keep things more manageable.

I’ve always known that an educated consumer was my best customer and that the best way to promote my business was by being a real resource.  It takes more time and effort to create a site that people will want to link to, but in the end that’s much smarter than buying the traffic with other marketing tricks.  And having a lot of valuable content also increases the likelihood that someone will actually want to use your service too.

The amount of resources that go into the Keyword Lookup is scary when I stop to think about it.  If you were to process the queries that our servers do each month, one at a time, in real time into the SMS800 database, they would take literally hundreds of years of processing time to complete.  We can do that in a couple days.  And if I had known how much work it would take when I started I probably never would have even started this.

It costs us $10,000 a month just to keep the programs and lights all running, but we do this to help make it easy for you to find a good number for your business, and because it doesn’t make sense for every phone company to develop this type of resource.  So I do this, basically as the vanity number search department for every phone company.  Give it a try and let us show you how easy it is to find a great number for your business.

If you have any questions or need more help, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 1-800 MARKETER or billquimby@billquimby.net.  I really enjoy this niche and try to help as many people as possible.  Remember, your phone number is your front door to new business.  And the right number will make a significant difference to all your marketing for the life of your business and ultimately make you a lot of money.

Why do we take calls until 10:30pm and sometimes later, even on weekends?

Because the definition of customer service is just being there for your customer or prospect when they need you. Good customer service doesn’t require great skills as much as it simply requires accessibility and a little bit of politeness. We also take calls outside of normal business hours because it’s usually easier to just take a minute and answer their question, than it is to try and keep track of it and get back to them during your primetime. I guess it doesn’t hurt that our industry is full of big companies with big company attitudes that have lost touch with that small company human approach.

We also take calls when we’re out of the office, driving, or just about anywhere except in a movie or meeting. If you reach Bill during the morning and he’s out of breath, it’s probably because he’s at the gym. And don’t be surprised if you hear children in the background, or in the car because they are never very far away, since flexibility and the ability to spend time with them is one of the reasons he’s organized this virtual organization like this. He enjoys helping customers and has kept that personal touch even as the business grew right along with his family.