Toll-Free Number
Toll-free numbers can help deliver customer-first calling experiences. Empower your customers to call you for free and enjoy increased business credibility and accessibility.
Speak to an expert to learn more about how toll-free numbers could help your business.
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What Is a Toll-Free Number?
A toll-free number is a phone number beginning with a toll-free prefix code. The most recognized toll-free prefix in the U.S. is 1-800 (or 800), but other toll-free codes exist, such as 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833.
Toll-free telephone numbers give your customers the ability to make toll-free calls.
What is a toll-free call? It’s a call that’s billed to the recipient rather than the person making the call. So, customers can make calls to your company without being charged.
A Toll-Free Number For Business Use and a Whole Lot More
Toll-free numbers are just one type of business phone number. Here are some of the different types of phone numbers and features that you can get with Vonage Business Communications (VBC) as your hosted phone system, either within your plan or as flexible add-ons.
Toll-Free Company Number
Provide customers calling from the U.S. or Canada with a toll-free business number that they can rely on. Pay for a bundle that meets your needs — without per-minute charges — to enable your customers to call for free.
Local Business Numbers
Establish a local presence in different regions by setting up local business numbers. With an unlimited amount of area codes, create targeted, localized marketing campaigns that convert.
International Phone Number
Do you have customers around the globe? Use an international company phone number to express your maturity and empower customers to call you without incurring extra charges.
Secondary Line Appearance
Add an extra line to your existing desk phone to give it the power to manage a second extension. Secondary Line Appearance lets you answer calls, make calls, and view extension statuses, streamlining your workflow and boosting productivity.
HD Call Quality
Experience optimized, high-definition call quality across your mobile, desk, and web phones with HD Voice. Provide a better experience in limited bandwidth or poor network environments, and feel confident in your ability to connect with customers and clients.
Receptionist Console
Tackle large call volumes with the Receptionist Console add-on and see your employee productivity levels soar. Simply assign the Receptionist Console service to a user extension to grant it the ability to handle up to 50 simultaneous calls
How Do Toll-Free Numbers Work?
Toll-free numbers work in exactly the same way as any other phone number. All your customer needs to do is dial the number to be routed to your company’s customer service team, sales representative, advisor, or any personnel you’ve set up with a toll-free number.
The only difference is that it’s you — not your customer — who will pay for the call.
Alternatively, if you’ve enabled the click-the-call feature on your website, customers can simply click to call you — again, all without it costing them a cent.
From your end, you’ll need to set up a toll-free number with your provider. This may work slightly differently depending on whether you opt for a standalone toll-free numbers service or a full business phone system or communications platform. And different providers will typically have different rates, packages, and extension allowances, so it’s important to do your research.
Security and compliance
Secure communications that meet your industry’s regulatory requirements. See VBC Security & Reliability
How to Get a Toll-Free Number With Vonage
It’s easy to get a toll-free number with Vonage if you’re already a VBC user. Simply request the Toll-Free Company Number app and a note gets sent to your VBC administrator for approval. Once approved, the app appears in the VBC Desktop and Mobile App.
This add-on is priced at $39.99 a month, is available for VBC customers in the U.S. and supports toll-free inbound customer calls from the U.S. and Canada.
The Benefits of Toll-Free Numbers — For You and Your Customers
Thanks to their mutually-beneficial advantages, toll-free phone numbers are popular with both businesses and customers. Here’s why you might wish to set up toll-free lines in your company.
Drives Customer Satisfaction
Before toll-free numbers, customer communications were rigidly business-first. If customers had to get in contact with you — whether it be to make a complaint, ask a question, or resolve an issue — they had to pay for the privilege.
The introduction of toll-free numbers in 1966 in many ways marked the growing recognition of the “customer experience” as a driver of trust or loyalty.
Toll-free numbers are important to the customer experience. They remove financial and locational roadblocks to provide accessibility to your customers whenever they need you.
This can have multi-faceted benefits. It may prevent customers from falling off the sales funnel or leaving you for a competitor. And, it could significantly increase satisfaction and help you nurture loyal customers. This all has the potential to improve your revenue.
Enhance Your Portability
Toll-free numbers are a type of virtual phone number, making them natively portable. You can retain the same toll-free number even if you relocate your business headquarters, create remote teams, or switch providers.
This means that your customers won’t have to find or remember a new number, which can be a jarring task for customers who know your number by heart. Plus, you’re less likely to fall victim to communication interruptions. With a customer service toll-free number, your call center can operate as normal even during internal transformation.
There’s an added bonus, too.
The flexibility of toll-free numbers means that you could take customer calls from anywhere. Calls can be forwarded seamlessly from your office desk phone to your smartphone or home office phone, empowering remote, on-the-go, and outside-of-business-hours communication.
Establish a Professional and Credible Brand Identity
Toll-free numbers have increasingly become synonymous with large, respected businesses. The memorable 800 prefix emanates trust and authority, so if your company has one, it can help add those elements to your professional brand identity.
Customers will not only trust you enough to contact you, but will also feel confident picking up the phone if you call them. Setting your toll-free number as your caller ID is easy, and it helps to reassure customers that you’re not a scammer.
Other common toll-free prefixes, such as 888 and 877, may not be quite as recognizable. However, they are likely to still inspire more confidence in customers than an entirely unfamiliar prefix.
Enriches Marketing Initiatives
Another useful thing about toll-free number services is that they often come as part of cloud-based business phone system solutions. This means that you can monitor a range of real-time analytics for inbound calls to your toll-free numbers, such as call volumes, call duration, geographic location, and more.
Why would you want to do this? Let’s say that you have multiple billboard marketing campaigns and you want to see how each one performs. By assigning different toll-free numbers to each campaign you can track how many calls each campaign generated as well as the nature of these calls.
Using these insights, you can identify your most successful campaigns and reallocate budgets and resources to drive better results.
Improve Brand Legitimacy and Please Customers With a Toll-Free Number
Give your brand a stamp of legitimacy with a toll-free number that your customers can trust. As well as increasing your credibility, toll-free numbers empower customers to contact you from anywhere, at any time, without incurring charges.
The more accessible you are to your customers — and the more you aim to resolve their pain points — the more satisfied they’ll be.
Contact a Vonage expert today to learn more about how VBC could help your business to thrive.
FAQs About Toll-Free Numbers
Toll-free numbers are assigned by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) on a first-come, first-served basis.
The easiest way to set up a toll-free number is to sign up with a business phone service provider. Most service providers are FCC-approved, which means all you have to do is search for available toll-free numbers via your provider’s inventory.
So, you already have an existing toll-free number but are looking to change providers. Can you port your existing number to Vonage, for example? And if so, how long does it take?
Vonage supports number porting for most toll-free numbers, which means that you should be able to transfer your existing 800 number over to Vonage. All you need to do is sign into your Admin Portal and fill out a Letter of Authorization (LOA).
Most toll-free numbers will be successfully ported within 5-21 business days. However, the exact time heavily depends on your previous service provider and how quickly they approve the transfer request. Other factors, such as providing incorrect or incomplete information, can also delay the process.
By far the most popular and utilized toll-free number code in the U.S. is 800. However, other codes denote a toll-free number, too, such as 888, 877, 866, 855, 844, and 833.
The cost of a toll-free number will vary from one provider to the next.
Some providers offer toll-free numbers at a flat monthly rate with no additional per-minute fees. VBC users, for example, can get the Toll-Free Company Number add-on at a flat rate of $39.99 a month.
