With millions of companies across the world still coming to terms with a massive, sudden transition to work-at-home environments, technologies to enable teleworking have been front and center. Many tech companies have reported significant increases in their cloud communications and collaboration solutions, which give workers access to the same communications tools they have at the office.
In reality, though, despite the unfortunate circumstances, the rapid rise in remote communications tools is merely pushing many companies into the Future of Work. For years, companies have been expanding their remote and mobile workforces to increase flexibility, embrace cultural change, and expand hiring geographies.
One of the challenges of remote and mobile workers is the BYOD trend – workers are using their personal mobile devices for business activities. For employees, that can be a disruption, especially when business calls come in during off hours. It can also be confusing when answering calls – people tend to answer business and personal calls differently. For businesses, it also creates an identity dilemma, as employees are using their personal numbers for business calls.
Phone.com and Web.com are solving these problems, while giving small businesses the ability to quickly and easily enable remote workers through a new mobile communications service. Phone by Web.com is a mobile communications service and app that provides a unique phone identity for business calls, completely separated from users’ personal mobile identities.
“Remote work is a crucial aspect of today’s business landscape and we are proud to offer a solution that lets users connect from the mobile devices they love while maintaining professionalism and brand identity. ”
Phone.com CEO Ari Rabban
The solution allows workers to use their personal mobile devices for work purposes, while always being able to differentiate between inbound calls from friends and customers or colleagues. Likewise, they are able to place business calls from their dedicated work number using either the mobile or web app. They can also set schedules for when they want to receive business calls, to avoid inbound calls during off hours, like evenings and weekends, if they so choose.
Unfortunately, at this time, businesses are not able to port over existing work numbers to the Phone by Web.com service, which means they will have to forward existing business numbers to the service – and pay for both – if they want to retain their current numbers for inbound calls. However, Phone by Web.com does use and AI engine to custom match phone numbers and domain names to create more memorable numbers to help with brand identity.
The mobile app is set up to use a cellular connection for calls by default, but users can enable WiFi calling to reduce cellular usage, which is useful for users without unlimited calling plans or who have poor cellular signal in their home offices.
The Phone by Web.com service is available now to Web.com and Network Solutions customers, with a first month free offer to help small businesses easily make the transition to remote working.
“This offering is a unique business communications tool for today’s always-on, mobile professional. “We’re always hunting for new ways to simplify life for our customers so providing the ability to address both business and personal calls on a single device was an easy decision once we started looking closely at it.”
Web.com CEO Sharon Rowlands
