I own a small family memorial masonry business which has been established for over 150 years, it is very well known in the local area and as you can imagine I mainly deal with elderly people who like a simple, easy service whenthey come to that time in life where they have to deal with losing a loved one and coming to me to buy a memorial. My company phone number is older than I can remember and this is where my biggest percentage of work comes from.
So, when I had to move premises a few years ago BT told me that I couldn't transfer the number as it was a different exchange area, about 300 metres down the road from my old premises!
The only other thing they offered/sold me was a voip service where I would need:
- a new phone line/number
- broadband
- porting of original number
Feeling cornered and this being my only option I agreed and accepted even though it was a lot more expensive than a simple phone line like before.
When set up this all worked fine so I have continued with this method up until recently.
BT CLOUD PHONE!!!
A few months ago BT called me and said they are stopping their voip service and are migrating everyone on to the cloud service. Again this got sold to me as I got told this is my only option of keeping the original company number, also telling me how brilliant the new cloud app is and saving me a little bit of money I had to accept again.
When setting the cloud up I couldn't believe that me the paying customer had to do it all myself and BT do nothing apart from guide you on the other end of the phone when they don't really know your circumstances.
- Elderly people call the original number and it does not even have a normal ring tone sound, it plays music which instantly makes them think they have called the wrong number and they hang up.
- The settings keep changing on there own in the app, I set it up to call me on my mobile when someone rung the office over christmas and a week later it had just decided to cancel everything I had set up on the app.
- It is not needed for a one man small business.
- It is causing me to lose business through no fault of my own.
I have some big concerns with the cloud phone app for my business but over all my biggest question is:
Surely in this day and age there must be a simpler way for me to keep my original company number rather than all this what I have ended up doing?
If anyone can answer or help I would be most grateful.
