For companies who want to expand their presence in different countries, it is important for them to have an international call forwarding service.
By providing a customer with a local number within his or her country, you will create a local phone presence and will allow your customers to interact with you easily.
After all, what consumer or future customer wants to buy from a company that requires making an ‘international call’ to ask a question or order a product? That is why it is a superior sales strategy to offer potential or existing customers a ‘local’ access number in their country. That local phone number will then redirect their call to you in ‘any’ country and to any type of phone, mobile or landline.
For example, your company could be located in Singapore but you have customers in the UK. You can own a UK local number and the calls would be redirected to your phone in Singapore (or any country).
By having call forwarding through international toll free or local numbers for each country, you can easily create a local presence. Customers will also be happy to see a number which looks familiar to them, for example if you owned a UK virtual number the dialing syntax would be exactly the same as any other UK local number.
Using an international call forwarding facility does not require on your part to have a local office or local employees to take calls. What it requires is that all the calls are redirected to a number of your choice. This redirecting to a number can be in any form – a cell phone, voice mail, office phone or a call center even fax machine, VoIP or PBX.
Included with your call forwarding number will be a private online account login facility which allows you to change the ‘ring to’ number to which all calls are redirected in the event you need to change it. For example, change it from a landline in the daytime to a mobile phone in the evening. The changes occur in real-time.
The process is very simple – when a customer dials a local international virtual number, his call is automatically redirected to a number which you have designated to receive such calls. The caller ID is also displayed and the caller can hear a local ring tone instead of a ring tone of the ‘ring to’ country.
But there are some complications also in this which you will have to overcome, such as linguistic and time differences. Your call center may be present on the other side of the world, receiving the calls at night at your ‘ring to’ number when it may be daytime on in the callers time zone. Also, calls could be handled by operators who speak different languages. Still, having an international virtual call forwarding number is much cheaper than maintaining a brick and mortar location in another country.