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Small business phone number
Does your small business need a phone number? Whether it's for a new location or setting up a new employee, you can get a number by signing up for any of Dialpad's affordable plans. You can:
Get a virtual local number in minutes
Port over phone numbers if you need to
Make phone calls, have video meetings, and send SMS/MMS + instant messages from a single app
Try it free for 14 days.
What is a small business phone number?
It's pretty much just as the name suggests: it's basically a phone number that a company uses to call and receive incoming calls from customers, prospects, and any other people on a regular basis. Strictly speaking, there's no difference between a regular phone number and a "small business phone number"—it's not like there's a different number of digits or anything.
You can sometimes get a business number for free when you sign up with a PBX or business VoIP phone system provider. How it usually works is you sign up for a monthly or annual plan, and they'll give you a dedicated business phone line as part of the package.
With a good, modern service provider, you should be able to make calls and send texts using this business number on not only your desk phone, but also your personal cell phone and even computer (usually through a desktop or mobile app, which your provider should also provide).
Why get a small business phone number from Dialpad?
With so many business VoIP providers, it’s easy to get swept up in the options available. But Dialpad’s AI-powered collaboration platform comes with not just a small business phone service, but also...
Quick and easy setup
Most small business owners don't have the luxury of big IT teams that can manage a complicated phone system. With Dialpad, you don't have to worry about that. You can easily manage business numbers, add or remove users, manage other add-ons, and more, right from your online account.
Industry-leading AI
Not only can Dialpad AI transcribe your calls in real time, it can also summarize your meetings in a concise recap that gets sent to attendees after the call.
Truly unified communications
Dialpad isn't just a small business phone number service, or even just a phone system. It's a robust platform that gives you phone calls, SMS/MMS text messaging, video conferencing, and more—all in one intuitive app that works across PC, Mac, iPhone, and Android.
Excellent call quality
With a unique dual-cloud architecture and worldwide data centers, Dialpad is designed to give you crisp, clear phone calls around the world.
Robust customer support
With Dialpad, you get 24/5 web and chat support on the $15/month Standard plan, and full-on 24/7 web, chat, and phone support on the $25/month Pro plan. Not only that, there’s a detailed and thorough online Help Center where you can find answers to common questions, whenever you want.
Call forwarding
Never miss a call or make callers wait in long queues again with Dialpad’s call forwarding and call transfer features. You can choose up to five call forwarding numbers—send calls to your colleagues, your personal cell phone, another landline, whatever you want.
👉 Fun fact:
Dialpad also has some pretty delightful custom hold music. (You can even Rickroll your online meeting attendees if you want.)
Need a small business phone number?
With Dialpad's affordable and customizable pricing plans, you can get an AI-powered communications platform that includes a local number for free. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to try it out or, take a self-guided interactive tour to play with the app first!
Simple call routing
Dialpad comes with virtual receptionist and auto attendant features, which means your callers can automatically route themselves to the right people without your staff lifting a finger. Plus, you can change the call routing options yourself in minutes, right from—you guessed it—your online dashboard.
Unlimited call recording
With Dialpad, you can easily record phone calls with just a tap or click. You can set up automatic recording to make things easier, or if you want to be extra careful with compliance, you can manually turn recording on and off.
Integrations with your favorite apps
From HubSpot to Salesforce to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Dialpad integrates with a wide range of business apps to automatically log phone calls and activities, let you make phone calls from right inside your CRM, and more! (Or build, your own custom integrations with Dialpad's API.)
Flip your calls
Not only does Dialpad work across desktop and mobile devices, it also has a useful call flip feature that lets you flip a call from your computer to your cell phone (or vice versa) without interrupting or dropping the call. Need to step away from your desk? No problem. Just flip it.
Visual voicemail
Sometimes, you just don't have time to listen to all your voicemail messages. (Like when you're stuck in back-to-back meetings.) In these situations, Dialpad's visual voicemail feature transcribes your messages so that you can read them quickly instead of having to listen to them—much faster, and much more convenient.
Customizable caller ID
Who wants to carry around two phones all the time? When you make business calls or send texts on Dialpad's app, you can choose which custom caller ID you want to display. This way, you can shield your personal phone number, even when you're using your personal cell phone for work.
A note: Different types of small business phone numbers to choose from
There are different options of small business phone numbers to choose from, each with slightly different use cases. Each type can receive incoming calls from customers—the main difference is in what they charge, to whom, and what the business phone number looks like.
Local numbers
The most common type of business number is the typical local number. To reach customers in your area, using a local phone number reduces the cost of calls to your standard local call rate. Within Dialpad’s phone plans, a new local number is provided for free with the area code of your choosing, and you get free unlimited calls in your country, the US, and Canada.
Similarly, for businesses across multiple locations, having local numbers for each office or site expands your reach affordably.
Toll-free or 1-800 numbers
To make it easy and free for your customers to get in touch with your sales, customer support or general team, you could use toll-free numbers, which charge the business or person being called instead of the person making the call (in this case, your customer or prospect). Known as a 1-800 number in the US, these numbers begin with a toll-free code (like 1-800 or 1-888) and provide free phone calls for callers.
Vanity numbers
Also generally using the toll-free prefix, vanity numbers are usually spelled out with letters (corresponding with numbers on the number pad), making them more memorable and ideal for advertising. Vanity numbers tend to be more expensive, but they are more easily recalled by customers.
These tend to include words that link to the business or the business name, emphasizing your number in marketing campaigns, like 1-800-FLOWERS. These can also be made up entirely of numbers in a recognizable pattern or sequence, like 1-888-520-2020.
International numbers
If you’re growing your small business worldwide, then you probably need an international number. This allows calls to be made to and from your number from anywhere in the world at a standard rate. If you’re regularly taking and making long-distance calls, an international number could save money for both you, your customers, and your suppliers.
📚 Further reading:
See how BNAmericas uses Dialpad to get US numbers, Mexico numbers, Brazilian numbers, and Chilean numbers as part of their sales calling strategy.
Set up your small business phone number in minutes
Setting up a new business number shouldn’t be hard. And it shouldn’t take days or weeks.
Whether you’re hiring new employees or needing more phone numbers for your sales or customer support team, you can get set up with business phone numbers in minutes with Dialpad.
Even the cheapest Dialpad Connect phone plan comes with unlimited calling in your country, the US, and Canada—not to mention a local number included!
Get more than just a business number
Dialpad gives you a versatile communications solution with a built-in VoIP phone system, SMS/MMS + instant messaging, video conferencing, and more—all at a low price. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to try it out now! It takes just a few minutes and you’ll be set up with a virtual phone number too.
FAQs about small business phone numbers
It's pretty easy, in most cases. Some folks will buy a business number just on its own (like you can do with very basic services like Grasshopper), but it's not usually the most convenient way. With many business VoIP or UCaaS providers, you can just sign up for the business phone system or unified communications software, and you'll be able to pick a local number or port over your existing numbers that are currently linked to your traditional phone system.
With Dialpad, for example, not only do you get unlimited inbound and outbound calls in your country, the US, and Canada with any Dialpad Connect plan, but you also have the option of buying a vanity number or toll-free number—all conveniently online. From that same dashboard, you and your admins can manage your team phone numbers and lines, and add or remove users too.
Yep! In most cases, we can port your old business number over to Dialpad without interrupting your service. You can then assign these within your new phone system to individuals or as your main business number. Just submit a request to port one or multiple business numbers and Dialpad will take care of the rest.
With Dialpad, you can port an existing number so that your business can keep the phone numbers that your customers and prospects are used to. The thing to remember with porting is that your current VoIP or phone number provider has to first release the number for us to be able to complete the port. If everything goes smoothly and they don't hold up the porting process, our team can help you port numbers with no downtime.
To port a number into Dialpad, you'll need to provide some account information, including the account owner’s name and address and the numbers you want to port. When porting a mobile number, there may be additional information, such as your account number and PIN, needed to complete the transfer of your number to the new network.
Once you have your small business phone number, you can continue setting up your phone system. Typically, one of the first things you'll have to do is add users and devices so that your team can pick up incoming calls using their desk phones, mobile phones, or computers. The other essentials include setting up your voicemail greeting, virtual receptionist, auto attendant, and call forwarding numbers.
If you're using a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or cloud phone system, it should be easy to do all that in a few minutes(!) from an online portal or dashboard. With traditional legacy service providers (like RingCentral), this would usually taken days or weeks to do, since you'd need to contact your provider's customer support team and wait for them to implement those changes.
Usually, this is also when you'd download your provider's desktop and mobile app so that you can access your phone system and work from anywhere.
In most cases, this is pretty easy and fast with Dialpad, since small businesses tend to have much less complicated setups than global enterprises.
(Of course, that's not the case with all virtual phone system or business communications providers.)
If you have any existing business numbers that you want to port over to Dialpad, just submit a port request in your online dashboard, and we'll get that process started for you.
If not, then it's even simpler. Because Dialpad integrates with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, you can easily import any contacts over!
From there, you can do the usual setup things, like downloading the desktop or mobile app, setting up your voicemail, adding fax lines, and more—all from your account online.
Yes! Whether you’re looking for a local number, toll-free number, or vanity number for your small business, you can get these through Dialpad. With a range of phone plans that all come with a local number as standard, you can add-on toll-free numbers and virtual phone numbers as you like.
Not only can you personalize the caller ID that displays when you call someone using your business phone number, but you can also personalize the phone number itself by adding a vanity number to your phone plan! You can choose the sequence of numbers in your small business phone number, even including letters and words to make it more memorable.
(Even with the local number you receive as part of Dialpad communications plans, you have the freedom to choose the area code that it begins with. This means callers in the region of your area code can call your number at local rates. If you have multiple branches of your small business in different locations, having multiple local numbers can cut the cost of incoming calls.)
Dialpad's call recording feature is really easy to use. You can set up all calls to be automatically recorded (for training or just for your records), or you can manually record and pause recording during a phone call.
And our built-in AI, Dialpad AI, can also transcribe your calls in real time. After, you can easily search your call transcripts for keywords or terms, which is much faster than having to listen to every call recording one by one.
And the bonus: You get unlimited call recording storage, even on the least expensive plan.
Anywhere! You can use Dialpad's desktop and mobile app on your Android or iOS smartphone, desk phone, office phone, or computer (though the computer may be the easiest way to check things like your call logs and call management settings).
A desk phone does give you a more traditional user experience, but you can't do video conferencing or send instant messages on it. some phone service providers have transcription functions for voicemails and calls.
Even though Dialpad's unique dual-cloud architecture and global voice network are designed to give you exceptional call quality around the world, most VoIP services should be able to provide call management and service from anywhere you can get Wi-Fi or a good network.
Yes! Other than providing high-quality conference calls and basic phone line functionality, a good small business phone system should be compliant and have robust security standards.
Dialpad can help you maintain SOC2® Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance, and calls over the VoIP network (as well as in transit web requests) are encrypted using TLS and application data that's permanently stored at rest uses AES 256-bit within the Google Cloud Platform.
Dialpad also offers integrations for access management via SAML and SCIM from providers like Azure, Google Workspace, OneLogin, Okta, and more. Learn more here!