Use a business texting service to keep your personal number private

The drawbacks of using your personal phone for business communications

The only real upside to texting people from your personal phone for business uses is that it's easy. Not all easy things are smart, though. Whether you are texting or even calling, having your personal phone number out there leads to a bunch of undesirable potential consequences.

• Personal and business life is now mixed and hard to separate as you want
• Your personal phone number is out in the wild and it can be shared and used as much as people want, leading to calls and messages outside of your actual working hours
• When people call, you can't tell if it's related to the business or not
• If you move on from the business you were associated with, your personal number is still connected to that business
• None of your coworkers can access the messages you send from your personal device
• Bulk messaging options are limited
• Some industries require higher levels of security for storing communications on the business side

Each of these items can be addressed with other tooling. The key is to never expose your personal phone number to customers because once it is out, it has the potential to get to many more people. Normally that's good for business (growth and word of mouth), but you can still get the growth without connection to your personal contact information.

Options for hiding your personal phone number from customers while texting

In the end, we are going to recommend you use Rather Text, it's why we built it! There are some other options you may want to consider first if you are ok with their own limitations.

You can use a dedicated business cell phone and plan. This can make sense for owner/operator type businesses where there is one person in charge of all the communications and they are often out in the field themselves. You'll get your own phone number and be able to separate your personal and business lives. The main downsides here are the cost of the phone and plan and you still have the limitations of using a cell phone if you need to have a lot of conversations happening at the same time.

Did you know you can use your email to send text messages? This is something to use sparingly and it's a bit of a convoluted process. If you're in a bind, though, it may be useful.

There's also a variety of apps and websites that either anonymously send the messages, mask your phone number, or use a random number not associated to you. These one-off services fall victim to the same sort of limitations as email to text, but also include the fact there isn't something tangible for customers to link to in terms of the phone number that represents your business. It may work for the communication it was meant for the first time, but after that the connection to your business is gone. That could be a good thing, but not applicable to many use cases you'll need.

The recommendation we have is to use a software service that was built for your business use case. Of course we are in the camp of Rather Text being the wise choice, but there's many out there. We encourage you to examine them all and find the fit that matches your needs the most.

At Rather Text, we pride ourselves on simplicity. Running a business is difficult. The last thing you want to do is add unnecessary complexity. The tools you choose to use should be a net-benefit, without question.

The benefits of using a business texting service

If you're bought into the fact that people would rather text than email or call, then you need to support that method of preferred communication. If these business texting services are so great, what makes them great? It's a question you are asking yourself right now. Here's the main ones we want to call out:

• Leave your personal phone number out of the equation
• Leverage the superpowers of the web and leave the limitations of using a cell phone texting app behind (think bulk messages, tag management, auto responses, etc)
• If desired, manage communications on a larger monitor and keyboard
• Share your customer communications easily across members of your team
• If applicable, enable text messaging on your existing landline
• Leverage call forwarding for people trying to call your text-enabled phone number

Business texting services exist to make your life easier and your customer communications more effective.