Move to wherever you want to be from just £15 + VAT!*

Page rank	5

Page rank	5

If you want to expand your business to operate in new areas, can’t afford to rent lots of new premises in those areas but still want different phone numbers for all of those areas then DBS Telecoms has the solution.

How can a business grow without spending huge amounts of money that they don’t have in tough economic times when they really need to keep a bit of a safety net in the bank? David Clarke, Director of DBS Telecoms, explains how you can use a virtual number to make your business appear to have premises in whichever part of the country you like for a far cheaper price than buying or renting premises in those areas.

“DBS has a database which contains area codes for 479 different UK towns, cities and areas” says Clarke. “These are virtual numbers, which are also known as ghost numbers. They can be pointed at any existing UK landline or mobile phone number, and you can have more than one virtual number pointed to the same landline or mobile phone. You don’t have to live in a specific area to have a virtual local phone number for that area.”

“So, if you’re a company based in Birmingham, and you want to expand your business so that you carry out work in Coventry, Leicester, Derby, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Northampton and Worcester, but you can’t afford new offices in those locations, then you can still get numbers for all of those areas which can all be pointed at your existing 0121 landline number in your head office. So you could get a virtual 024 number for Coventry, a virtual 0116 number for Leicester, a virtual 01332 number for Derby, a virtual 0115 number for Nottingham, a virtual 01782 number for Stoke, a virtual 01604 number for Northampton, and a virtual 01905 number for Worcester. These numbers could be put on adverts going out in those areas and on the internet, so that the company appears local in all of those areas. You could then put a ‘call whisper’ on each of those numbers, so that when you get a call at your office in Birmingham, when you answer the phone you get a short recorded message in your ear telling you which number the call is calling, for example ‘Nottingham call’ or ‘Birmingham call’. Thus you would know where the caller was expecting you to be.

If you use a fax machine it is also possible to get a fax to email virtual number to match your virtual phone number, so that your customers are phoning a Leicester phone number but then sending a fax to a Birmingham number. “Fax to email is a fantastic resource anyway,” says Clarke “as it saves your business money and resources and also helps the environment. For most things these days, email has replaced fax, but there are still a few occasions where a document needs to be faxed through to someone. It is such a waste of energy having to leave a fax machine switched on constantly for when these rare faxes are sent. Fax to email converts the faxed document to a PDF and sends it straight to your email inbox instead. You don’t have to print it, so you save on paper and ink, and you can store it in your computer files, saving space on your shelves and making it easier to find.”

“So, in this scenario, a company that previously operated only in Birmingham now operates in seven other major cities. Each virtual number has cost £15 + VAT to set up, and the monthly rental is £5 + VAT. If you had wanted the fax to email as well then that would have cost the same. The call whispers would have cost £5 + VAT to set up, and then £5 + VAT rental per month, although DBS offers discounts on multiple orders. Now think how much it would have cost to rent premises in all of those locations. That huge saving can instead be spent on staff, equipment, and other important resources necessary for the business to expand.”

DBS’s wide range of 479 different area codes, from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, mean that a company can effectively appear to move to wherever they want within the UK without having to fork out the huge costs of actually doing so, thus giving them far more money to use on other issues.

*virtually using a DBS virtual phone number!