Tips and Procedures
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The AppliancePartsPros team

Telephone

Personal vs Business Line

The telephone company has two classifications for lines into your home: personal and business. They differ in the way they are listed in the phone book and in cost.

  • Personal A personal telephone number will be listed in the residence white pages or at your request, it will be unlisted.
  • Business A business telephone number will be listed in bold text in the residence white pages and will be included in yellow page ads. A business line will cost roughly twice as much per month as a personal line.

Second Personal Line

You will want to have two lines when you are running a business out of your home. The reason is that you will want to answer your business line using your business name such as, "Bob's Appliances, may I help you?". If you just answered, "hello", your potential customers will think they have reached a personal number by mistake and may even hang up before you get a chance to confirm that they have called the right number.

If you consider ordering a second personal line for your business line to save money, remember that you will not get a business listing in the white or yellow pages. In other words, your customers are not going to be looking for a business listing in the personel listings. Your potential customers are going to look for a business in the yellow pages. Bottom line: if you are going to run a small business, order a business line.

Answering the Phone

Instruct everyone answering the telephone for a family-operated business as to where they can find the inventory or anything that a potential customer may ask for. Always answer with your business name to help the caller confirm that they have called the right number.

Answering Machines

Answering machines are the last ditch capability to catch a call when no one is around to answer the phone. They will never be as good as a well informed person answering any question that may come up. Many new customers will not leave a message. They will listen to your whole answering machine message before they hang up. Therefore you should include the most frequently requested information in a message that is no longer than 30 seconds. You can try computer generated messages from telephone answering systems (like those on many 1-800 numbers) but many people don't have the patience to deal with them. Bottom line: nothing can beat a friendly, well informed person answering a business line.

Cellular Telephone

You should get a portable cellular phone as soon as your business overhead can support one. If no one can answer the business line, forward the calls to the cellular phone instead of letting the answering machine try to catch them.