What is a virtual number?

Nothing is installed anywhere. The number exists at the carrier and delivers calls to a mobile, a phone system, or software.

Businesses use them to separate things that used to need separate lines. One for the shop, one for the emergency rota, one on each advert.

Costs are low enough that the separation is worth it for measurement alone. A number per campaign tells you which advert produced the phone call.

They are also the easy way to look present in a city without renting an office there, which is the honest and slightly awkward part of the pitch.

Say a mobile dog groomer has run her business from her personal cell for three years. Every client has the number and some text at 10:00 at night. Until she answers, she can't tell a client from her sister.

She buys a virtual number in her own area code for a few dollars a month. It goes on the van, the website and her cards. Calls forward to her cell from 8:00 to 6:00, and outside those hours it goes to an answering service. Her cell labels those calls, so she knows to answer with the business name.

The catch is callbacks: when she returns a call from her cell's normal dialer, the client sees her personal number again and saves that one. Her provider's app lets her dial out showing the business number, and she has to use it every time for the split to hold.

Can it text? Many virtual numbers handle voice only. Those that do text usually need your business registered with the carriers first, a process US providers call 10DLC registration. Unregistered business texts get filtered, often with no error shown to you.

Who had the number before? Carriers recycle numbers, and a freshly issued one can come with the last owner's callers: their pharmacy reminders, their old customers. Ask how long the number sat unused, and expect a few wrong numbers in the first month anyway.

Can you port it out? Once it's on your van, the number is a business asset. Get the porting policy in writing before you print anything.

What caller ID shows when it forwards? You want the option of seeing the original caller's number and not only the virtual one. Without it you can't call people back.

You can forward any number to GreetKeeper, virtual or otherwise, and keep the one already printed on your van.

Where you run several, each number can have its own hours, greeting and calendar under one account, so the assistant knows which number was dialed.

Every answered call produces a transcript and summary, which is the part that makes a tracking number worth having.