Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I'm starting a home-based virtual assistant business in my home office, a room which has a phone jack. In addition to having a second phone line installed as my business line, I want the capability to add addition phone lines as needed for clients who want live phone answering for a phone line that is theirs exclusively (they will forward their calls to the line I host for them). What are my options?

I'm worried  that having more than 2 phone lines in a residence gets a little squirrely - Comcast has been remarkably unhelpful. I'm certainly open to simply having a cell phone for each account, but I'm hoping for something more elegant than that.

Hi Shanna,

There is no way to avoid having multiple phone lines set up at your location. However, if you're willing to put your callers on hold until you or your employees are done with their call, then you can use Hosted IVR by CallFire or OneBox.com.

Good luck!

Chathri

Try Google Voice. If you haven't heard of it, it's a free solution that Google uses to give sign ups to call others using VOIP tech. I use it and it works pretty well. It also let's you route your "voice" number to any phone. Which is what I use, it's like having two phones packed into my singular cell phone.