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You do – if your business requires permanent support, if you are serious about customer service and branding.

No, I am not talking here with my fellow bloggers and freelancers – we actually don’t really need to invest in toll free numbers – not just yet. In a special situation (growing as fast as Yaro Starak) we’d probably need to perfect our services with a toll free number, but till the day comes when we can afford such a solution, we have free tools like Skype to communicate online.

Anyway, back to business toll free. There are a few companies that should actually bother to offer such a communication channel. For example, I run this blog on a 1und1 (German for 1and1) web hosting package. Expensive and far from being smooth and trouble free. Each time I want to talk to customer support I (the actual injured party) have to pay. I have to pay for support?! Amazing.

Of course, I didn’t know the drawbacks when I first purchased the hosting and the domains. I just wanted a website and 1und1 is the most popular provider in Germany, after T-com. But the more I think about it, the clearer becomes for me that 1und1 is probably the worst web hosting company one could ever choose. Period. The only reason why they are still in the business is that they actually are a corporation. And corporations survive against all odds. Look at Google! It’s clear that this is the monster in our closets and most of us feel the Google evil touch often enough to hate it forever, but do we ever stop using it? No. It’s like plague: there’s no escape from Google. Heck, it might even come up disguised as a toll free number provider for that matter (I really wonder how they missed out this field!)

So 1und1 could do a much better job at customer support with a toll free!

Any hosting company that doesn’t offer non-stop free LIVE support (and 1und1 doesn’t) would do better.

But the web hosting industry is not the only one that could benefit from using such a tool.

Even non-profit organizations list a toll-free on their pages. Toll free providers sponsor such companies often enough – a smart PR move. Is this enough to clarify why toll free numbers might do a lot of good to your business? Probably not. But let’s take a look at some of the advantages, shall we?

• increase business credibility
• better customer support
• show respect to customer needs
• get more responses from potential customers (yes, if it is free, they will use it!)
• move your business wherever you want without needed to change your number each time

Of course, using toll free numbers might get tricky – that’s why I said at the beginning of the article that it is not for freelancers – as our funds are probably not big enough to cover the costs of hundreds of calls made to our imaginary accounts. People tend to use toll frees even for silly questions like: “how much it costs the 20 USD plan?” Yet many freelancers use toll frees – to make their businesses appear bigger (deceiving your clients, in any way, is not the most fortunate business approach).

There are enough toll free success stories on the Web to justify the “explosion” of the industry. There are also horror stories – with toll frees used for phishing, identity theft and so on. But I’d say (based on the advantages listed above) that toll frees can only benefit a big company with serious corporate and branding standards and with a genuine commitment to customer support.

Toll free companies do recommend their product to all possible customers, and on this toll free blog there is enough valuable information to help you better understand what toll frees are and how they work. If you contemplate this communication tool for your site, try to do some research first and see whether this is really for you.