In June 2020, 32% of office workers worked from home full time. Another 51% reported that they worked from home at least one day per week (the most common being three days a week). There is a lot of uncertainty about what the workplace of the future will look like, but it’s clear it will involve remote work. The rapid transition to remote work brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has transformed the way that we work and increased business owners’ need for flexible, mobile tech solutions.
According to a study conducted on the US remote workforce in June 2020, executives identified the top four things they were working to provide employees with to better succeed with remote work, and they were: greater flexibility in work hours, better hardware and equipment, better mobile experience for work applications and data, and better security policies to support remote work.
As the transition has been so rapid and business owners are continuing to pivot and adapt to the situation, we’re seeing businesses go remote on the bring your own device (BYOD) model. Meaning, companies are asking their employees to use their personal phones for business calls while they’re away from their desk phones. The biggest downside to this strategy is not having an employee use their personal phone for work, it’s having them use their personal phone number for work. Here are the biggest drawbacks.
Professionalism
Depending on your employees role and the kinds of calls they will be making, this point may be more important for some segments than others. But whether they are calling customers back to schedule services or reaching out to vendors, any professional business would prefer that call to appear as an incoming call from their business, as opposed to an unidentified cell number. If the person you are calling can see what business you are calling from before they answer, that establishes the situation upfront. With the Verizon One Talk mobile app, employees can call from their business line and configure the caller ID to read the company’s main number or their direct business line.
Security
Having your employees call from their personal cell phone number doesn’t just appear unprofessional, it exposes your employees’ private information. As an employer, you have a responsibility to protect your employees’ privacy and data, and you can understand why employees would not want work contacts and clients to have their personal phone number.
Customer Privacy
And on the other side, keeping business calls in the Verizon One Talk App keeps your customer and business contact data private as well. Call logs, messages, and voicemails are the property of the business and access to customer data can be controlled.
Work-Life Balance
The Verizon One Talk mobile app allows your employees to separate their work calls and texts with their personal calls and texts. Although it’s the same device, when a phone call or a message comes in, your employee can immediately distinguish if it is personal or professional. This boundary ensures that professional calls are always answered appropriately, and you’re not going to confuse Becky from Accounting with Your Cousin Becky if those conversations are in different places.
Additionally, the One Talk Mobile App allows employees to control the call flow to their business line, so they can turn on Do Not Disturb outside of working hours or on their day off, and send the calls to their voicemail or their sales partner while they are recharging.
Verizon One Talk is the only mobile-first business phone solution. If you’d like to learn more about what your business can do with One Talk, please select a time to speak with a One Talk sales engineer.
