What Is Toll Free?

We’ve all heard the term “toll free number.” Nearly all of us have called a toll free number at one time or another. But just what does that term mean and how do businesses go about getting toll free numbers?

You know that toll free telephone numbers must be something special because you aren’t assigned one automatically. When you order landline, VoIP or cellular telephone service, you are assigned a 10 digit phone number that relates to a specific geographical area. I’ll assume you are located in the US or Canada, which both use the North America Numbering Plan (NANP). Your number is formatted as: 1-NPA-NXX-XXXX.

Here’s how that breaks down. 1 is the trunk code or country code. Other countries use codes other than "1". It used to be that we thought of dialing 1 only to make a long distance call. Nowadays, with multiple area codes for each city, most of us have to dial 1 plus the area code even to make local calls. NPA is the Numbering Plan Area code, also called the area code. You might dial area code 312 for Chicago or 213 for Los Angeles. By knowing the area code, you know roughly where the call is going. That can be manipulated somewhat by VoIP providers, who will assign you whatever area code you want. Do you want people to think your business is in Manhattan? Get a 212 area code.

There are some area codes that have nothing to do with geographical areas. These are the toll free area codes, also called toll free prefixes. “Toll” means a charge by the phone companies for making calls that go outside of your city or local area. Therefore, “toll free” must mean that the calls are free of charge, right?

Actually, toll free is a misnomer. What that term means is that the calls are free for the calling party, who normally pays the toll charges on long distance calls. With a toll free number, the charges are automatically reversed. The caller gets a free call. The person who owns the toll free number gets charged for any incoming calls.

To get a toll free number assigned to you, you have to order one specifically. You can easily do that online from companies that specialize in marketing toll free numbers. There are two different types of toll free calling plans. You can pay a small fee for the number plus a small maintenance charge each month plus the cost of incoming calls by the minute. The other option is to pay a fixed fee each month for use of the toll free number regardless of how many or few calls you receive or how long you talk.

Toll free numbers are easily identified by their prefixes or area codes. The original toll free numbers all used the 800 prefix. Customers call you at your toll free number of 1-800-NXX-XXXX. The NXX-XXXX is your unique toll free number. As long as you are paying for the number, all calls will come to you. If you decide to give up the number, it will eventually be assigned to someone else.

Just how do you get those toll free calls? They come in on whatever phone you assign them to. Unlike a regular phone line, a toll free number isn’t assigned to a particular wired connection or wireless phone. Instead, you assign a “ring-to” number to the toll free number. When a toll free call comes in, it will ring to the phone number that you have specified. That can come in handy if you won’t be near your office phone but are expecting an important call. Change the ring-to number to have your toll free calls sent to your cell phone or other phone. The only thing you can’t do is have one toll free number call another. The ring-to number has to be a real phone line.

Toll free numbers have become so popular that other area codes beyond 800 have also been assigned for toll free service. These include 888, 877, 866 and 855. You can choose any of these prefixes for your toll free number since they all work the same way.

Get a Toll Free Number Instantly

You’re starting a new business or breathing new life into an existing one. You’ve come to the conclusion that a toll free number will help you get more sales prospects and orders. It will also improve your reputation for fast and easy customer service. Now that you’ve made the decision you’d love to get started right away. But you have to wait at least a week to establish a toll free number, right?

Wrong! You can have your toll free number up and running in less time that it takes you to read this article. If you don’t want to wait even that long,order and activate your toll free number now. Yes, you can have an 800, 855, 866, 877 or 888 toll free number for your business or personal use as close to instantly as possible.

How does this work. It’s all thanks to the highly efficient online provisioning process from Kall8. They have gone to the trouble of setting up a large collection of toll free numbers, so all you have to do is select one you like the look or sound of and place your order. You pay for these with a credit card that is also billed monthly for your service, so there is no long approval process involved.

How much will a toll free number set you back? Hold on to your chair so you fall off. The cost is just $2 each for 888, 877, 866 or 855 prefixes. That’s what you pay to get your number assigned and set up for use. Then the cost is just $2 a month to maintain service plus the cost of incoming calls on a per minute basis.

Note that the older 800 toll free numbers are slightly more expensive. Those are $5 each and $5 per month plus the cost of calls.

There are even more expensive vanity numbers that spell out specific words on the telephone keyboard to make them easier to remember. Examples of numbers now on the vanity list are 1-877-9-Alimony (1-888-925-4666) and 1-877-5-BIGMONEY (1-877-524-4666). The prices on these vary from $15 to over $100 for setup and monthly fee. What’s an example of an expensive one? How about 1-877-5-MESOTHELIOMA (1-877-563-7684).

What do you get with your Kall8 toll free service? First, you get your number ready to use as soon as you complete the order process that takes only a few minutes. You specify which phone you want incoming calls to go to. These numbers don’t have their own phone line. Instead, you program them to ring to your office phone, home phone, cell phone or other phone that you’ll be near. You can change this ring-to number any time as your location changes so that you’ll never miss a call.

Do you get voice mail? Yes, it’s included. You can call in to get messages from the system or have them sent to you as attachments to your email. That way you can hear your messages on your computer without having to pick up a phone. You’ll also be able to get FAX messages sent to your email as attachments. No need for a separate fax machine to get messages. Just tell clients to send them to your toll free number.

Other features include call blocking, maximum call length setting, Caller ID, and even conference calling with up to 25 participants. These features are included as part of your monthly service fee, starting at just $2 per month.

How much will you pay for calls? The cost to the caller is free, of course. You pay 6.9 center per minute for calls from the 48 US states and Canada. There is a surcharge for calls that come in from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam and Saipan. Payphone callers will cost you an extra 60 cents per call, per FCC tariff.

With toll free numbers as cheap as $2 each and $2 a month, plus 6.9 cents a minute for most incoming calls, it’s hard to go wrong getting a toll free number for your business. There are no contacts involved, so if you don’t want the service anymore, you can simply cancel and only pay for the usage to date.

Sales Lead Generation in a Recession

Are you getting sucked into the recessionary vortex along with most businesses? Are old customers buying less and prospects few and far between? Sure would be nice if you had an cheap and easy way to generate more sales leads wouldn't it? Well, you can with a virtual assistant from iTeleCenter. This is more than an automated attendant or voicemail system. It is a lead generating machine.

The iTeleCenter virtual phone system for business is a communications service that acts as a sales system. Consider it a force multiplier for your sales team. It allows a small staff to appear to be a much larger staff. That's the power of technology.

So how does it work? First, you should know that the magic is all on high power telecommunications servers remotely hosted at a central location. It's so powerful that your customers will never hear a busy signal no matter how many calls are coming in simultaneously. You don't need to buy a new system or even any more phones. iTeleCenter uses what you have now. It just makes a regular phone system into a really powerful phone system designed to maximize sales performance.

It starts with your own toll free number that prospects and customers call to access your sales team. Hide your regular phone number. This is the one number you'll publish. It's toll free, so clients won't hesitate to call regardless of where they happen to be. That's not just important for nationwide businesses, but any business that has prospective customers beyond a few mile radius of the business location.

You tell iTeleCenter what phone number to call to reach you from that toll free number. That can be your regular office phone, your home phone, or your cell phone. It will forward your calls up to 5 different phone numbers if that's what it takes to reach you. How does it know which sales agent or functional area to call? Everyone has their own extension number. The main greeting helps your callers get to the right extension.

Yes, there's voicemail if someone just plain isn't available. But it's unlimited voicemail. It never gets full. You can tell the system to send you a text message whenever a voicemail arrives. Or whenever someone sends you a FAX message. Those are graciously accepted too. Both your voice messages and FAX messages can be accessed by email from wherever you happen to be. Plus if you want to return a call, you can do that with the press of a button. The system knows the caller's phone number even if they didn't leave it in their message.

In full sales mode, the iTeleCenter offers 24/7 informational mailboxes. It's a recorded message hotline that offers callers a review of your products or information about your location and hours. If callers like what they hear, they can press a button and be connected to you immediately. Your system is bringing in prospects while you're working other leads.

There's much more to the iTeleCenter system that will help your business gather and convert more prospective customers. But you're probably wondering what sort of giant cost is involved. It starts at $9.95 a month. You don't even have to spend that to try the system. There's a iTeleCenter 7 day free trial so you can see for yourself. It has a 30 day money back guarantee so you can be sure it's right for your business. There's even a special version for real estate agents called TeleCenter Real Estate Pro.

Add a Toll Free Number For Next to Nothing

You'd like to expand your business phone features, but upgrades can be expensive. Here's a way you can add an inbound toll free number to whatever telephone service you have now, including your cell phone, for just a couple of bucks a month.

Toll free numbers offer a big advantage for nearly any business that publishes a phone number. Within a very localized calling area, customers can call your local number without getting charged. But even a few miles away, that call will be considered local long distance and they'll get dinged a higher rate. Across the border in the next state, prospective customers may really hesitate to make that long distance call.

But give them a toll free number and they'll gladly call you from wherever they happen to be. After all, with an inbound toll free number you pay the cost of the call. It's free to the caller. So much do callers hate to pay long distance charges that toll free numbers are expected for sales and customer service lines. Otherwise, your business may not be taken seriously.

What they don't know is that you're paying next to nothing to have that number available and a very small per minute fee for the calls that come in. Toll free numbers start at just $2 to register and $2 a month to maintain. That's within the budget of any size business and even contract professionals. If and only if you receive a call on your toll free number, you pay just 6.9 cents per minute for calls that originate within the contiguous 48 states and slightly more elsewhere. The only people who will call this number are serious customers and prospects, so it's the most cost effective 6.9 cents a minute you can possibly spend.

But there's a lot more. With Kall8 Toll Free Service your toll free number comes bundled with a wealth of handy features. You get voice mail, call blocking, caller ID, call forwarding and conference calling. Those are typical phone service features. But Kall8 also gives you the ability to program the number you want your toll free calls to ring to. Set it to your office phone, home phone or cell phone. The caller has no idea where you are. They are just calling the toll free number. Mobile professionals will change the ring-to number during the course of the day, so they never miss a call.

Speaking of mobile professionals, Kall8 includes a couple of service that make it easy to maintain an office from your laptop computer. Your toll free number doubles as a fax number. Someone can simply send a fax to your toll free number and it will be sent to you as an email attachment. The same is true for voice mail. You can have your voice mails sent as sound files attached to emails so you can listen to them on your computer wherever you happen to be.

Pretty fancy for $2 a month, right? There's more too, including detailed call reports that you can view in your online control panel. This service is so versatile that marketing companies will buy up a bunch of toll free numbers so they can track the response from each ad they run separately. After all, at this price toll free numbers are one cheap business tool.

Low Cost 800 Numbers Are Here

Are you becoming convinced that an 800 number would really help your business? That is, if you could only afford one. Just put a toll free number on your business card or advertising and customers near and far won't hesitate to call. Not as long as you're the one paying for the call. But can you really afford the cost of acquiring an available 800 number and then paying for all those calls? You sure can when you go with the right toll free service.

I say toll free service because 800 numbers are only one of several number types that don't charge the caller, even for long distance calls from the other side of the country. To be precise, they are called in-bound toll free numbers and include 800, 866, 877, and 888. Why so many? Demand, that's why. The original toll free service was only phone numbers that started with the 800 code. It remained that way for many years, so "800 number" is what people think of when they want to call a business but not pay for the call. Customer service departments are huge users of toll free numbers.

But 866, 877 and 888 work the same way as 800. Why pick one over the other? Cost and availability of the number you want is the reason. Yes, you can still get 800 numbers. They're $5 each to set up and $5 each to maintain. That's your only cost to own and publish the number. You only pay more when people call. For that you pay 6.9 cents per minute for calls from the 48 states. There's a surcharge of 7 cents a minute for calls that come in from Alaska and Hawaii.

How about those other numbers? An 866, 877 or 888 number will run you $2 to set up and $2 a month, plus the same 6.9 cents a minute for incoming calls. It doesn't matter if your choice is just a random collection of numbers or if it is one of those easier to remember repeater numbers that end in something like 1111 or 1212. The price is the same. You only pay extra if you want a vanity number that spells out the name of your business or something else, or one of the limited number of premium 800 numbers that are really easy to remember.

Unless it's really important to have a particular number, you'll probably find something that will work just fine for you from the list of currently available numbers that are ready to go. You look through the list, pick the one you want and order it immediately online. By the time you're done inputting your credit card information and completing the order, you're number is ready to use.

The beauty of this particular service, called Kall8, is that you get an online control panel along with your number. You can set parameters for how many rings before callers are transferred to voicemail (included) and which phone number you want your toll free number to ring to. Many sales professionals and small business owners routinely change their ring-to number from their home phone to their office phone to their cell phone, depending on where they happen to be. The caller only knows that they can easily reach you anytime and not pay for the call. There's also an advantage that the only number you need to print on your business card is your toll free number.

Kall8 includes a wealth of features with your toll free service, including FAX to email that lets callers just send a fax to your toll free number. You get an email with the fax attached. Pretty handy, right? Caller ID can simply pass the caller's number or display your toll free number. That's handy when you have multiple numbers for different purposes, such as different offers, different ads, or multiple businesses.

Would a low cost 800 or other toll free number enhance your business for very little money? If you think it might, learn more and order your Kall8 toll free service now.