Should Personal Cell Phones Be Used For Business?

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Jul 09, 2020

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The case against “mobile selling.”

The “mobile selling” phenomenon has become even more prevalent thanks to a rise in remote work. It’s likely that, due to current events, you and your sales team are making calls from home. It might seem like a good idea to use cell phones to make your calls, but in this article, we’re going to explain why the use of personal cell phones can be detrimental to productivity, work-life balance, and functionality.

We’ve compiled five reasons why we at Arbeit stopped using personal cell phones for business, and we believe sales teams everywhere would benefit from making the change as well.

5 Reasons Against Using Cell Phones for Business

1. The Expectation of Compensation

If you force your sales team to use their personal cell phone to make calls, they will be well within their rights to ask you to pay their phone bill. To give you an idea of the cost, consider this:

An average cellphone bill is around $75/line. A VoIP phone system like this one with full transferring functionality and unlimited calls is $30/line. If you have a sales team of 5, your cost difference is $225/mo. Can you really afford that?

2. The Inability to Record Calls

When you are using cell phones, call recording is not automatically built into your team’s calls. This means if a client claims one of your sales reps verbally harassed them, or that they cancelled their service, or told you to use a different phone number to reach them, you have no point of reference to confirm these claims.

In addition, recording calls can be an incredible training tool for your sales team. Routinely listening to your team’s sales calls and reviewing them with each rep can result in more confident sales reps. If your team is using cell phones, there is no way to utilize this training tool.

3. The Lines Left Open

What happens when a sales rep leaves? Their personal cell phone will still be stored in the phones of customers. How would you like to call someone who you thought would help you, only to find out they no longer work for the company? This is an immediate turn off and will reflect poorly on your team and your company.

4. The Lack of Boundaries

If a client needs to get in touch with you at any hour, they won’t be routed through an IVR – they will go straight to you or your employee’s personal cell phone. They probably won’t see a problem with calling the number provided to them, regardless if you are off the clock, on vacation, eating dinner… you get the idea. You will have no buffer between yourself and your clients.

Not only is this intrusive, it makes it impossible for you to find time to separate yourself from work. You might see this as a good thing – being available to clients 24/7 – but you may instead find yourself frustrated, burnt out, and disrespected.

5. The Lack of Functionality

Have you ever called the phone number provided to you by a vendor or service provider and they say, “Sorry, I can’t help with that. Hang up and call this number instead.”

That’s one too many barriers for a frustrated customer.

If you are using cellphones to take and make calls, you have no way to easily transfer to your support team, and this can cause immense frustration, both for you and the client calling in.

With a VoIP system, you can easily transfer already frustrated customers to the individual or department that will help them, rather than making them jump through hoops to get the help they need.

Consider the unnecessary cost and frustration you would avoid by switching to a VoIP system that is built for sales teams, instead of relying on cell phones. If you are wary of the process of switching to a VoIP system, click here to read about how this debt collection agency was able to switch over with less than 20 minutes of downtime.

About The Author

Alex Villafranca

Alex is the CEO, co-founder and Head of Revenue at Arbeit, a better outbound communication software that makes businesses more profitable.