Split responsibility for calls and texts by sharing one number with your whole team. Get a shared phone number in minutes.
Have you ever wanted to clone yourself just to handle all the calls and messages coming your way? Or, more realistically, set up a phone number that rings multiple people on your team?
You can do that easily with a shared phone number. A shared phone number is a single business phone number that multiple people on your team can call and text from.
Whether it’s for sales, customer service, or internal operations, a shared phone number leads to faster response times and less time spent on getting caught up with your team. You can collaborate on communications, delegate tasks, and stay up to date on projects more easily.
In this guide, we’ll break down how shared phone numbers work, how to share a phone number with your team, and common reasons companies use a shared phone inbox.
How does calling and texting on a share number work?
Our analysis of 16.7 million missed calls found 69% didn’t get a callback within 48 hours. That translates directly to missed business.
By using shared numbers across your team, you can minimize this issue — and the missed opportunities that come with it. Here’s how:
- Everyone gets calls. When you get a call, everyone with access to the phone number will have their mobile phones or computers ring. The only exception is if they have Do Not Disturb on. In Quo, you can set the ring order as all at once, random, or custom. The first person to pick up stops the ringing for others. Your team can place concurrent calls so the number is never “busy.” If you’ve enabled call forwarding to a teammate’s direct number when you’re away, you can share your number instead. That way, you still have visibility into conversations that occurred once you return.
- Everyone gets messages and voicemails. When the shared number receives a message or voicemail, everyone sees it in their Quo app. All conversational messages, voicemails, and call histories sync so you know whether a conversation was opened.
- See who said what. Every outgoing message shows the team member who sent it so you can coach your team as needed. You can also see who made or accepted a call.
- See who’s typing. You can see who’s drafting a response as they’re typing, so you don’t send multiple replies to a customer.
- Shared contacts. Your business address book is shared with everyone sharing the number. If someone adds a customer’s name or details, all team members will see that contact information on Quo right away.
Common ways businesses use share phone numbers
Now that you understand how shared numbers work, let’s explore some of the most common ways they can be useful for your business:
- Customer support or inbound sales calls. Shared numbers help ensure each call is answered promptly. It also prevents missed calls when employees are unavailable.
- Main phone number for the company. Use one shared number as your main point of contact. List it on your website, company registration documents, and government forms, and share it with your entire team.
- Assistant support. Invite your assistant to your phone number to help respond to calls and messages.
- Office buzzer or delivery services. Use a shared number for building entry systems or delivery drivers. Any available team member can respond instead of relying on one person.
- Ability to work on the go. Utilize shared virtual numbers on mobile apps and laptops instead of traditional desk phones.
- Improve first call resolution. When multiple people share access to a number, anyone free can jump in and help a customer quickly.
- Multilingual or international support. Set up a dedicated team for each language or region. Then give that team its own shared number for faster call routing.
- On-call and remote support coverage. Give on-call or remote workers a shared number. That way, someone’s always available, even off-hours or off-site.
How to share a phone number with your small business team
Quo is one of the best ways to share a phone number with your team members, giving you shared calling and an SMS inbox. Here’s how you can get a shared phone number on Quo:
Get a shared phone number in minutes
- Create an account with Quo.
- During sign-up, select your city or area code in the US or Canada to pick your local phone number. You can also get a toll-free phone number.
- Choose the plan that works best for your team. Quo’s pricing is transparent, starting at $15 per user per month.
The Starter plan gives you access to unlimited calling and messaging to the US and Canada, shared phone numbers for up to 10 users, manual call recording, voicemail transcriptions, and more.
The Business plan, starting at $23 per user per month, gives you access to shared numbers with up to 100 users, AI call recording tools, advanced call handling, and more.
- Invite the team members you’d like to have access to your phone number via the Admin Dashboard. They’ll get an email with the link to the mobile and web apps.
- Customize your inbox and call settings. Once you add your team, you can label phone numbers, create a phone menu, set up business hours, set up voicemail with custom greetings, and more. Plus, you can prevent missed calls that lead to lost customers by setting up Sona, Quo’s AI voice agent.
6 benefits teams get with sharing business phone numbers
In case you need to convince your colleagues that a shared number is a no-brainer, here are a few key benefits you can pass along.
1. Reduce missed calls via a team phone number
Shared phone numbers can help ensure no incoming calls or messages slip through the cracks and that your team responds before your customers look elsewhere. By assigning the ring order as all at once, random, or custom, you can ensure your team never misses an important call.
But what if a customer trusts a specific person at your company? Realistically, that person can’t be available 24/7. But you still want to provide good service. In that case, a shared number lets your team work behind the scenes on that person’s line. The customer still feels like they’re working with someone they know, while the team handles the work behind the scenes
Speaking of delegation, need to assign a follow-up to a team member? Use Quo’s Tasks feature to create action items directly from conversations and track them alongside your inbox. Assign tasks to teammates, set due dates, and mark them complete without leaving Quo.
Want to see what that looks like in action? Pool cleaning company Integrity Pool Service used Tasks to give every follow-up a clear owner. The result? They saved an estimated 16 hours a month on follow-ups.
“There’s no ownership without tasks. I estimate it saves me about three to four hours a week in marking unread, checking, reminding, re-checking, explaining what needs to happen next, plus coordinating follow-ups between team members.” — Ashley Carter, Co-founder of Integrity Pool Service
Want to get immediate answers and share context inside a conversation? Use internal threads to loop in teammates on incoming messages and collaborate on responses. Customers will never see these messages among teammates.
2. Split responsibility for incoming calls and texts
Share the load by setting work schedules in Quo so your teammates are available during specific shifts.
Direct numbers can also temporarily serve as shared numbers when someone on your team needs to take time off. Simply share access, and your teammates can easily cover business calls and texts.
3. Get clear oversight into your team’s communication
Want to continually improve the customer experience? More visibility into how your team interacts with customers can unlock coaching opportunities that shorten your sales cycle.
Quo Analytics is a dashboard where Owners and Admins can view analytics for all numbers. It shows:
- Total incoming and outgoing calls and messages
- Total unique conversations
- A talk-time distribution
- An activity heat map of your busiest days and hours
- A per-teammate breakdown of call, message, and conversation volume, each with a change indicator against the previous period
Because a shared number splits work across many people, the teammate breakdown shows who’s handling the most calls and messages. That makes it easier to balance workload and set performance benchmarks.
For day-to-day oversight, use Quo Agent to answer questions about your calls and texts. You can ask Quo Agent to:
- Flag inbound messages that didn’t get a reply
- Show which reps took the most calls
- Surface calls worth reviewing with your team
- Find out your customers’ biggest concerns
- Draft a follow-up reply for your approval
💡Pro tip: You can use Quo’s Claude integration to automate things further. Once you give Claude access to your conversation history, you can set up a recurring task using Claude Cowork. You can set up a recurring report, like a daily per-teammate call review, and have it delivered straight to Slack or Notion instead of checking analytics manually. Check out the Quo template marketplace for Claude skills you can use to get started.
4. Create group phone numbers for departments and teams
As your team scales, you may need group numbers for different departments and teams.
With Quo, you can easily set up a main number with a phone menu that automatically routes calls to specific groups.
5. Keep your personal and professional numbers separate
With a shared business phone number, you won’t have to guess whether a call is personal or business. You’ll know which number is receiving an incoming call and can answer accordingly. Plus, your personal cell phone number stays private, helping you maintain a better work-life balance.
6. Create a better customer experience with contact notes
Just like business owners don’t like clients calling their personal numbers, clients dislike repeating themselves. Quo allows you to add internal notes to your contacts so you never miss a detail. For example, if a client prefers morning meetings, your whole team can be in the loop and schedule accordingly. And since contact sharing is built into that number, team members never lose context.
Get started with Quo as your business’s phone system
When you share phone numbers, you can streamline your business communication, improve collaboration, and ensure no call is unanswered. We built Quo to be the virtual phone system for modern businesses. Aside from setting up shared numbers quickly, Quo lets you:
- Manage your business contact lists and keep them separate from your personal connections
- Set up Sona, Quo’s AI receptionist, so you never miss calls when you’re busy or off the clock
- Integrate with Zapier, CRMs, and 9,000+ tools to work more efficiently
- Access unlimited calling and text messaging in the US and Canada
- Schedule texts, auto-replies, and other business texting features
- Set business hours and after-hours routing to an external number for emergencies
- Set up call recordings and AI transcripts and summaries for better record-keeping
- Work across iPhones, iOS devices, Android phones, desktop, and the web browser
Get started with a free trial of Quo.
FAQs
Yes. With a shared business number, multiple phones can access the same number. Anyone with access can pick up a call or reply to a message. This is different from call forwarding. With shared numbers, everyone accesses the same number and history rather than one number being redirected to another.
No, the recipient doesn’t know there’s a team behind a number. It looks like a regular conversation to them, as you contact them from Quo’s business phone number app – whether they send a message or call.
Yes, you can add multiple business phone numbers on Quo, such as a main number and separate department numbers, like sales and support. You get one free business phone number for each user, and additional VoIP numbers cost just $5 per month. If you have existing numbers — landlines, traditional cell numbers, or virtual numbers — you can port them to Quo for free. Any phone number can become a shared number by adding team members to it.
Yes, you can have up to 10 team members sharing the same phone number on a Quo Starter plan. Upgrade to Business or Scale to add unlimited paid users to the same number.
Once you invite a teammate to a number, they’ll receive an email invitation from Quo. They need to click Accept Invitation, and they’ll be guided through the onboarding process. They’ll then have access to the shared number you invited them to and be able to call and text from that number in the Quo workspace. Make sure to select the appropriate workspace role for them:
– Owner, someone with full access to the organization
– Admin, can invite other members and manages company billing
– Member, manages their own account
A group phone number, also known as a shared phone number, is a single phone number that multiple team members can use. It lets all team members make, receive, and manage calls and messages from the same number. Group numbers are a great way to ensure that no calls or messages are missed and provide a unified front to customers and clients.
A shared number is shared between multiple people or teams, ensuring someone can respond to calls or messages even when one person is unavailable. A dedicated number is usually assigned to an individual team member, making it their personal number.
There are three main pitfalls to avoid:
1. Forwarding calls to a colleague. If you use your phone for both business and personal calls, they’ll get both your personal and work calls.
2. Buying a virtual phone number and forwarding calls from it to multiple numbers. That means team members can’t call out from the original phone number. There’s no track record of outbound calls. As with the previous method, texts aren’t forwarded.
3. Setting up a business phone system with an auto-attendant and extensions. It could work for a larger team or a company with different departments. For a small team, though, it’s overkill. Plus, you can’t text to an extension.
Yes, you can have as many shared numbers as you want for just $5 per additional number per month. You can add up to 10 team members to a shared number on the Starter plan and unlimited team members on the Business plan.
You can mute any number you don’t need notifications from in your workspace settings. Here’s how it works:
Muting a number blocks you from receiving incoming notifications from that number.
You can still use the number to make calls or send texts. Muting a shared number won’t affect your teammate’s notifications — they’ll still receive calls and texts from that number.
Learn how to mute notifications in Quo.
