You run a smart business. Your customer base in the U.S. is solid, so you’ve worked through tax regulations, pricing, and supply chain issues to expand your presence. All that’s left is international calling.
How will you reach new customers in Canada, Mexico, and beyond when your base is in the U.S.? How will your customers reach you?
With the right VoIP phone system, you can easily answer those questions and overcome the challenge of international calling. It doesn’t have to crush your dreams of expanding beyond your borders.
Inbound Calling: How Will Customers Reach You?
An excellent example for demonstrating the use of international calling is the travel agency. Let’s consider a travel agency that has a home office in Washington D.C. but offers deals for international hotel stays and local sightseeing to individuals in Canada, Mexico, and Germany.
Presence at Home, but Not Abroad
Immediately, you can see the problem. The travel agency’s base is in one location – D.C. – but that base isn’t in the countries where it offers travel packages. Callers in the U.S. might not have a hard time calling the D.C. office. However, customers already traveling would have a difficult (and expensive) time reaching the States.
International phone numbers disguise that disparity in locations because they act like local numbers for callers. The travel agency can, through VirtualPBX, order an international number to provide a number of benefits to its callers abroad.
Local Rates, Convenience
For inbound callers, the primary benefit of international numbers is that they pay local rates.
The U.S. citizen who traveled to Germany for two weeks won’t need to concern himself with connection charges or exorbitant per-minute rates if he needs to reach the travel agency during his stay.
Similarly, the German citizen looking for local deals to an up-country weekend tour can call into the D.C. office as if it’s right down the street. For the same rate as calling the downtown coffee shop, she can reach across thousands of miles of land and sea.
Callers will also find convenience in the inbound calling process. International travelers often have to make special arrangements to get a new cell phone or service so they can remain connected throughout their trips. If they can complete local calls, they can avoid the burden of dialing international calling codes while also sidestepping high calling rates.
Benefits for Businesses
International phone numbers from VirtualPBX are priced at a low monthly rate. Businesses can then accept as many international calls as their plans allow – from 1,000 minutes on our Basic Dash Plan to unlimited minutes on our Unlimited Dash Plan.
International numbers route directly to a business’s office. Features like Call Transferring and Ring Groups can then help their Automated Attendant or employees move inbound calls to any department or individual on their account.
Businesses then gain the peace of mind in knowing that anyone, in any country they serve, can contact them at a moment’s notice.
Outbound Calling
Businesses can also sign up for a VirtualPBX business phone plan to get low rates on international calls to other countries.
All our plans include free calling to Canada. To all other countries, including Mexico and the U.K., we have used our relationships with international carriers to keep rates low.
Unlimited VoIP Minutes
Businesses that have locations in multiple countries can also use our phone service to complete calls between system users for free.
For example, a business with offices in the U.S. and the U.K. can use a VirtualPBX plan to gain free calling between those locations. When users in the U.S. office want to reach their satellite in the U.K., they simply dial the U.K. user’s extension to complete the call.
Because that office-to-office call resides in the same calling network, we don’t charge any extra fee or any extra minutes to complete the connection.
How Can International Calling Benefit You?
You might not run a travel agency. But if you have offices in multiple countries or offer services abroad, international numbers could offer you many operational benefits.
Your customers will experience friction-free calling when trying to reach your office. Your employees can easily reach each other across borders, regardless of the miles between them. If you don’t already supply international number for your customers or link your offices through a global phone network, this is your call to switch.
Need some new phones for your office? You’re in luck. Our Refurbished Phones and Hardware Sale has discount prices on desk phones, computers, and telephony hardware that’s ready to ship. Sale ends Dec. 31st!
