 RockyBBPremium
join:2005-01-31
Steamboat Springs, CO | reply to SteveinNC
Re: Can I Own an 800 Number ? yes, you can "own" a toll-free number, subject to the carrier's rules which almost always revolve around keeping your payments current. there are some sneaky providers that you'll find on search engines that will not allow you to transfer the number to a different carrier (which is an "ownership" issue), but they will allow you to point it to a different phone number.
the question is do you need a toll-free number in the first place? do your users dial the toll-free number, or are you call forwarding in the event of no answer? Is the answering service in your local calling area, or is it long distance? how many minutes of use normally get billed?
Here's a circumstance where a toll-free number is almost always worthless (relative to other options): callers dial a local number and are forwarded to an answering service in another state after 5 rings, and those calls average less than 4 hours of call time per month.
A telecom manager at EDS taught me a long time ago, "Don't give me what I ask for, give me what I want." Meaning that I had to understand what he was trying to do with a project, and ignore what his in-house analysts had assumed was the correct solution.
Just because a toll-free number was the correct solution in the past does not mean that it will be the correct solution going forward. Having just established that a toll-free number might not be what you want, why not tell us what you want to do? |
