New Phone Numbers and Old Contacts

As a part of my move tomorrow, I have to update my business address and phone number. Wherever I move out of state, I like to keep my phone number and mailing address as local as possible. Some people walk around with out of state numbers and old mailing addresses and it works for them. (I know someone who hasn’t lived in Florida in 15 years and still has Florida phone number.) But, I always change mine to reflect where I am.

It’s only because while being local doesn’t matter almost all of the time, when it does matter, it matters a lot. Some smaller businesses I write marketing copy for are local and the smaller the business the more they love that you’re available to meet every blue moon. Some of them even require it because of their own comfort level and I can understand if you don’t do business over the Internet how send some stranger a few hundred dollars by PayPal might be intimidating. I’ve almost lost accounts because the person looked at my area code and thought I was out of town. Would there be more where that came from if that happened? Sure. But, for me, it’s a small thing that doesn’t take a lot to make a difference with the ones who care. So I keep it where I live.I used Google Voice for my business number and while the service is generally free, it’s $10 to change an existing number. When you do it that way instead of just opening a new account with another email address, it leaves your old number active for 3 months. Anyone who calls either your old number or your new number gets through for that 3 months but when you call out, it’s always from your new number.

The reason that caught my attention was because I’d been having this conversation with a friend about how a client won’t stop using her old email address. I try to do it sparingly, but I’ve had to update my phone, email address and other information in the past after moves or a rebranding. I can understand her frustration because while you don’t want to lose someone’s business, it’s hard work to chase down calls, emails and snail mail sent to an outdated address. I try a three prong approach and it’s worked for the most part.

The first step is to tell everyone. It doesn’t actually have to be everyone in the world but I do alert my current clients and my master client list. It’s just an email with an update about how things are changing in my business. In it I explain what the changes are, the reason behind it and that I value their business so I want to make sure they can contact me with no worries. In the case of invoices, it’s no trouble just to change my template to the new information.

The next step is to give them a cutoff date for the old contact information. I usually pick some arbitrary date and lie to them. Yes, Virginia, I will lie to a client if it’s in their best interests. I’m no fool and I certainly don’t want to miss any important messages. I’ll forward email messages and snail mail just in case. As for the phone line, I know I’ll have three months where their calls still come through even if they call the wrong number. But clients need to know that they can’t keep using old methods or else they’ll keep doing it. It’s not because they don’t care that you changed your info. It’s because everyone likes to do the least amount of effort possible. So I give ‘em a deadline, even if it’s an imaginary one.

And then–and this is the most important part–I stop acknowledging that old information after the deadline I set. Now, that’s not about ignoring any messages or calls they send to the old information. I just always return with the new information. If you email me to an old email address, I reply from my new one. If you call my old phone number during that three months, Google Voice lets me return it from my new one. And invoicing is the easiest because almost every accounting department goes by the information on the current invoice without even thinking about it.

The reason that’s important is that most people just hit reply on your emails or click the call back button on their phones. So if you were to continue to use the old information, you’d just make it worse. If you return their messages with your new information, when they reply, it’s almost a given they’ll return that contact using your new information.