We really don’t want to be a big company. We’re in an industry filled with big companies that do a lousy job at actually helping the customer. We know our niche and are the best in the country at what we do, and we definitely don’t have a “Big Company” attitude. It’s not the fault of big companies. It’s just that, as you get bigger and bigger, you need more and more administration and support, and it becomes harder and harder to provide the level of service, support, and training you did to get big.
There’s a tendency for large companies to try to be everything to everybody, but in the end they usually wind up being the best at nothing. People always ask us why we don’t provide the ongoing service to customers because we’d make more money. We know that’s true because there is a lot more money in providing the ongoing service than there is in just finding the customer the best number. But, then we’d need more administration, more bureaucracy, and probably even have to hire those same people in India.
Our goal is to provide a system that empowers you
That’s also why we don’t do the searches for people over the phone or take orders over the phone. It’s not that we don’t want to help people but that it’s really more helpful to show them how to do a search than to do the search for them. Because after we do one search then they think they have to do all of the searches through us personally. And since most customers do several dozen searches before they decide on the number they want, going back and forth with us dozens of times would take days or weeks to do via email. Our goal is to provide you with the best tools that empower you to search as much as you want and to find the best possible numbers for as many people as possible.
So if you call us, you won’t get anyone in India or even voicemail. You’ll almost always speak directly to either Bill, Rita or Gloria and get the opposite of ‘big company’ service. We don’t do the searches for you or take the orders over the phone or do the things you can do yourself, but we are much more accessible than any big company and we can definitely help you.
We set the standard for customer service in an industry run by big companies that have all gotten too big to provide that small company feeling. And if you hear Bill’s kids in the background or Rita’s bird, we apologize but we’re real people with real families and are building this business as a part of our lives, not in some cubical in a big company during business hours. We really enjoy this crazy business and look forward to reminding you what customer service was supposed to be.
Bill quit his job in an office to pursue this business full time shortly after he started it in 1995, before the 888 numbers were coming out in January of 96. The business was very different and has evolved quite a bit since then as most small businesses do. Ironically he started this business mostly to do shared use, one of the things he warns people about today. 13 years later he has directly helped more people get vanity numbers than anyone else in the toll free world.
Bill pioneered the toll free consulting industry working for several years as the original Telenumeric Consultant obtaining great brand name numbers for large fortune 500 businesses that you see advertised every day. Many consultants to this day are essentially buying and selling toll free numbers but Bill was the only one that ever did the consulting for a flat fixed rate, that wasn’t based on the client’s size, amount of advertising or the value of the number they wanted.
Reinventing the toll free business
When he became a resporg in 2004 he quickly wound up filling a unique niche between the consultants and shared use companies that often charge an arm and a leg based on the value of the number, and phone companies that don’t charge anything and don’t do very much to help their customers get any really good toll free numbers.
Bill’s approach of charging a small fixed fee based on the time and effort required to retrieve numbers was and still is totally unique within the industry, as is their approach to pushing all of their customers away to other phone companies (http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/blogs/activations/getting-rid-of-our-customers.html) for the ongoing service.
Bill’s unique creativity, marketing and computer background have proven ideally suited to this business and he has demonstrated how one person with an entrepreneurial vision and passion can run rings around large companies, all from a laptop and cell phone from his kitchen table or backyard deck. He’s literally changing the toll free industry, so much so that now the representatives of nearly all major phone companies send customers to his website to use his unique look up tools to find numbers when their own companies fall short.
Our Team
Bill built the business for the first 10 years by himself. But one of the best things about it today is definitely the people that work with him today. Rita Thorn, one of his closest friends for 20 years joined Bill three years ago, and runs a good portion of the growing business from her home in Kentucky, along with the help of Gloria. There’s also Bud and his son Dan, in Minnesota who have built most of the custom databases and a slew of cutting edge servers necessary to crunch the enormous amounts of data needed for each search. It actually takes a lot more work than most people would realize to make this process so seamless and look so easy for the customer.
No matter how great technology is it’s only as good as the people behind it, so I am very excited to announce an excellent addition to our TollFreeNumbers.com team, Welcome Gloria! Finding the right people is one of the hardest parts of any job or business and it can really make or break an organization too. I’ve had the amazing good fortune to be able to get not only great people to make this work, but my best friends.
The people that work here at TollFreeNumbers.com are not only our best friends but are every bit as close to us, our kids and our family as our family. I think Gloria’s kids spent more time at our home than they did their own home at times and we love them, almost as much as they love our kids.
If you use our toll free service you will probably have an opportunity to talk or email with her at times. She will be doing many of the Activations, paying the affiliates (which I admit I did a lousy job of) answering the phones after she’s learned the ropes, and doing follow up calls and testimonials (which she’s aleady been doing for a little while).
We haven’t built her picture into the site much but we will and I’m sure you’ll enjoy working with her as much as we do. Several people have joked that we couldn’t clone Rita so we did the next best thing, hiring Gloria. We’ve got to keep them separated though because they have too much fun together!
We’ll add a few pictures here and we’re going to redo the About Us page to do a better job of introducing you to the people that make this silly business work. I think it’s a real plus to know who you’re talking to and she looks forward to getting to know many of you too.
We’re not a traditional phone company at all. We’re basically the toll free search engine for all phone companies.
We only have two full time employees (Bill & Rita) and we do virtually no advertising at all, yet we have far more customers than anyone else in the vanity number business and do a far better job getting good numbers for our customers than any of the Fortune 500 telecom companies. We do a good job and we fill a real need within the industry.
The simplest way to describe our business is that we’re the “GoDaddy” of the phone number business. Virtually everyone else in the vanity number business follows a very different “SQUATTER” business plan, similar to domain name squatters that look for good names that they think someone will want, and then trying to sell (or worse yet to rent) them for as much as they can get. Squatters obviously don’t need to sell as many numbers as we do because they often get tens of thousands of dollars for them. We have to help an awful lot more customers than they do because most of our customers only pay a one time search fee of $49 for finding numbers from the spare pool.
We describe our business as an Internet Search Service because almost 90% of the thirty plus thousand dollars per month it costs us to provide this service, are internet, database and search related. The actual telecom costs associated with our service are nominal compared to our search related expenses. Regular phone companies are ultimately trying to sell the minutes of usage but we don’t sell that or even send any monthly bills at all. We only charge a one time “search fee” if we find and get someone a number. We’re also give them all end user and portability rights with no strings at all.
We’re the only people in the vanity number business that get the customer numbers directly from the spare pool AFTER the customer order or reservation request just like regular phone companies. We’ve just better at searching and finding good numbers which is why our customers pay us a one time nominal “search fee” only when we’re successful at getting them a number they request. We’re not “selling” the numbers like squatters do based on their value. We simply charge a small one time search fee based on the typical cost of locating the number.
Even if they’re almost no help, every phone company has fees and/or expenses associated with setting up new numbers. Regular phone companies just bury that in the monthly service and usage charges which they keep on charging every month. Putting it up front is actually fairer and better for the customer in many ways. It gives the user more choice and allows them to select more competitive companies with lower usage charges which can’t typically give the customer much choice in their numbers. So we not only give customers more choices to select their toll free number, we give them more choices for their phone company too. This often saves the average customer far more than our small one time charge within just a couple months.
No other phone company or search process on web shows the public the numbers in disconnect. This dramatically reduces the scarcity. Vanity number squatters watch these numbers constantly and grab the good ones within seconds, leaving the public only the leftover numbers the squatters didn’t want from the regular phone companies. We’re the only organization that helps actual end users to compete with these squatters for the good numbers. Without us, end users wouldn’t be able to even see the numbers in disconnect, let alone ever get any of them.
We have two lookup tools on our website. The Instant 800 Lookup on the top of the pag may look similar to other site but it doesn’t just say whether it’s available or not this way other services do. It shows the exact status of the numbers including when they’re disconnected and even has an option to show the phone company responsible for each number too, for subscribers. We also provide potential alternatives that are available or in disconnect. The Keyword Search is even more powerful and totally unlike any other lookup anywhere. It allows users to enter several words or phrases and the computer checks thousands of related numbers and emails a list of hundreds of numbers that are available or in disconnect in about 1 minute, all for free. Nobody else does anything like this at any price.
We’re ultimately increasing the availablity of numbers by doing a better job of finding good numbers and enabling customers to get numbers that the other companies just say aren’t available. Regular phone companies don’t even show or have a chance at the good numbers any more. We’re really the only solution to the scarcity that exists within the market today, which is probably why we’re able to help so many customers without any advertising at all.
We’re also one of the only companies that don’t use our search process to lock customers into our service. Most of the search tools on the web are set up to automatically reserve every number they find available so that customers have to sign up for service through that site. This could be considered a form of entrapment and is underhanded and bad for the customer and bad for the free market. We are the only service which not only doesn’t use our superior lookup capabilities to make our visitors use our service but we actually require them to transfer their numbers to other companies, fostering consumer choice and competition.
This is probably why so many other phone companies large and small, refer prospects looking for numbers to us. Our openness and independence allows them to refer customers to us and we send them back for the ongoing service. Phone companies never refer their customers to any other vanity number business. Many phone company representatives also use our look up tools to find numbers and then get them themselves. So we ultimately help even more customers than the thousands that we get for our customers directly. We fill an important niche within the industry reducing the need for other companies to do all of the work to find vanity numbers for their clients.
So we ultimately fill a very unique and important role within the industry, not just getting vanity numbers for a single carrier but helping customers of every phone company to come up with or find numbers that regular phone companies weren’t able to. The proof of this is the growing percentage of our customers that are referred directly from other phone companies.
The best indicator of the value, importance and quality of our service isn’t actually anything we say but what our customers say. That’s why we include so many testimonials on almost every webpage. We have well over 1000+ glowing testimonials from actual customers. Being a small company we probably care more about our customers. That small business attitude really does make a difference and is one of the things that missing from big telecom bureaucracies today.
We don’t know every customer by name but unlike any other phone company, you’ll get the same people every time you call and you’ll get people that know the business and specialize in exactly what you’re dealing with. You won’t get customer service representatives in third world countries that speak broke English and can’t really do much to help you. You can even talk directly to the owner. How many businesses do you know, let alone phone companies, where you can speak directly to the owner.
