Most businesses pick their support number by accident. Somebody’s Safaricom line was on the first flyer, it ended up on the website, and eight years later it is still the number printed on the vehicle. It works, in the sense that calls arrive. It also quietly decides who calls, how many give up, and what people assume about you before anybody says hello.
There are three real choices in Kenya. They are not interchangeable.
A mobile number
The cheapest to get and the one most small businesses already have. A caller recognises the prefix, knows roughly what it costs them, and dials without thinking about it.
The problem is what it signals at scale. A mobile number on a bank’s website reads as a person, not a department — and callers treat it that way, ringing at nine on a Sunday because a mobile is a person’s phone. It also travels: when the employee who owned the line leaves, the number is an argument waiting to happen.
Good for: a small team, a field service, anybody whose customers already have the number saved.
A landline number
A Nairobi 020 number, or a county code, says office. It implies a premises, opening hours and somebody whose job is to answer. For a SACCO, a clinic, an insurer or a school, that is worth more than the cost difference.
It also survives staff changes, which a mobile tied to one person does not, and it is harder to confuse with a scam — a growing consideration when callers are wary of unknown mobiles.
Good for: anybody who wants to look established, and anybody whose callers are deciding whether to trust them.
A toll-free number
The caller pays nothing; you pay for both halves of the call. That is the whole trade, and it is a bigger one than it looks.
Toll-free numbers earn their keep where the cost of calling is genuinely stopping people — a member who will not ring about a KSh 300 discrepancy, a patient who is not sure whether a symptom is worth a call. In those cases the calls you get back are worth more than the airtime. Where cost was never the barrier, a toll-free number mostly buys you more of the calls you were getting anyway, at your expense.
They also take longer to obtain, because they go through the regulator rather than just the carrier. Plan for weeks, not days.
Good for: member organisations, public health lines, anybody whose customers are price-sensitive about the call itself.
How many numbers do you actually need?
One, to start. The instinct to give every department its own number comes from the days when a number was the routing — a different line ringing a different desk. A menu does that job now, and does it better, because one advertised number means one thing to remember and one thing to print.
A second number earns its place in three situations:
- Outbound. A recognisable number for calls you make, so people answer and so callbacks reach the right team.
- A campaign you want to measure. A separate number on one advert tells you exactly what that advert produced, which nothing else does so cleanly.
- A department that genuinely must not share. A fraud line, a whistleblowing line, anything where the menu itself is a deterrent.
Outside those, more numbers is more to maintain and more ways for a caller to reach the wrong place.
What a number costs
A number carries a monthly rental, and that is usually the whole of it — there is no reason for a setup fee on an ordinary local number. Check two things before you agree to anything: whether one is included in what you are already paying, and what an extra one costs when you need it.
On our own plans one Kenyan number is included in the price, and extras are KSh 1,000 a month each — you only pay if you ask for more than the one you started with. The whole rate card, including what calls cost, is on the pricing page.
Can you keep the number you have?
Often, and it is worth asking before you accept a new one. Where a number can be moved across, move it — the number on eight years of printed material is an asset, and replacing it costs more than any rental.
Where it cannot be moved, forward it. The old line rings into the same system, callers notice nothing, and you stop advertising it when you are ready rather than on somebody else’s schedule.
The question behind the question
People asking which number to buy are usually asking something else: how do I stop missing calls? The number is not what fixes that. A single mobile missing calls at month end will still miss them on an 020 line, because the problem is that one phone rings once and one person answers.
What fixes it is the thing behind the number — a queue that rings three people instead of one, a menu that sends the account query away from the sales desk, a callback offered instead of a wait, and a log that shows you what you missed. Choose the number for what it says about you. Choose the system for whether anybody is there when it rings.