Most contractors run their business from a truck. The office might have a desk phone or two, but the real work happens on job sites in Anchorage, the Valley, Eagle River or out on the Kenai. So crews do what’s easiest: they call customers from their own cell phones.
It works, right up until it doesn’t. Here’s why personal cell phones cause problems for a contracting business, and how a hosted phone system with the Bria Enterprise app fixes them.
The problem with personal cell phones
When a foreman calls a homeowner from his personal cell, the homeowner saves that number. The next time they need a repair, a bid or a warranty fix, they call the foreman directly, not the office.
That creates a few real problems:
- The employee owns the customer contact. The relationship, the callback and the next job run through one person’s phone instead of your company.
- When people leave, customers go with them. Crews change. When a lead moves on, or starts his own outfit, your customers still have his number.
- The office loses track. Scheduling, estimates and change orders get worked out in private calls and texts the office never sees.
- Your on-call process gets bypassed. If you run an on-call rotation for emergencies or after-hours service, customers who have a tech’s personal number skip right past it.
- Nobody gets a break. Crews get calls on weekends and vacations because their personal number is out there.
We go deeper on this in why you shouldn’t run your business on your personal cell phone.
The fix: the office extension on the phone they already carry
Bria Enterprise is an app that puts a business extension on a cell phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. Each person can run it on up to three devices. Your crews keep their own phone in their pocket, but business calls go through the app.
Here’s what that changes:
- Outbound calls show your company’s caller ID. When a crew lead calls a customer from Bria, the customer sees your office number, not a personal cell.
- Callbacks come to the company. When the customer calls back, the call comes into your phone system and follows your rules, whether that means the office, the right crew, or the on-call tech.
- Desk phone and app ring together. The office manager’s desk phone and Bria on her cell ring at the same time, so she can take a call at her desk or on a job site.
- Staff come and go cleanly. When someone leaves, their extension is turned off or handed to the next person. The customers stay with you.
Bria also includes video calls and team chat, handy for showing the office a problem on site. For the full picture of how it works day to day, see your office extension on your cell phone.
What the office still needs
The office is still the hub. The person who answers the main number, schedules jobs and handles billing usually wants a real desk phone. Our Snom desk phones have color screens and extra buttons, so the office can see at a glance who’s on a call and transfer a customer straight to a crew lead’s extension, even if that extension is on a cell phone in Palmer.
A few other features make a big difference for contractors:
- A phone menu that sends callers to estimates, scheduling or service.
- After-hours routing that sends calls to whoever is on call this week, on a schedule, without anyone forwarding phones.
- Voicemail to email, so messages reach the office and the right lead at the same time, and nobody has to dial in to check.
Busy season, slow season
Construction in Alaska runs hard in summer and slows in winter. On a hosted system, adding a user for the season and removing them in the fall is a change we make on our end, not new equipment. There are no long-term contracts, so you’re not paying all winter for summer crews.
How IBeXc helps contractors
IBeXc is a hosted business phone system from Finite Technologies, an Alaskan family company in Anchorage since 1990. We write our phone system software ourselves, host it in a secure Anchorage data center, and do the design and programming for you. We’ll set up your on-call rotation, your crews’ Bria extensions and your office phones so the whole thing runs the way your business runs.
Support is local, in clear spoken English, and escalation goes right up to the owner. Call us at 907-257-2600, or send a recent phone bill with your quote request and we’ll show you what it would look like to keep every customer call under your company’s name. Get a quote for your office →
