As eager as you might be to stretch your corporate operations overseas and mine your company’s potential in foreign markets, you could get heavily financially stung in the process. We are referring here to international calls, which can land you with four-digit phone charges if you aren’t careful.
Fortunately, significantly reducing the customary charges of making phone calls across borders can be a matter of “easy once you know how”. Here are some tips that we particularly recommend.
Use Wi-Fi to dodge international roaming charges
Charges for international roaming – in other words, making calls in any country besides your native nation – can be so prohibitive that your phone can feel next to useless as soon as you enter another country. However, you can avert the charges by switching to Wi-Fi for calls from your mobile.
Making this switch would entail, in your phone’s settings, switching off international roaming – a signal indicated by a vertical bar logo in your phone screen’s upper right side, says Entrepreneur.
Turn to smartphone calling apps
You can tap into the cost-effectiveness of using Wi-Fi for your phone calls if you download one of the many smartphone calling apps now available.
These apps include Skype – which, though best-known for facilitating free video calls, can also be used for voice calls from iOS and Android phones. However, you will need to buy Skype Credit if you intend to call standard landline or cellular phone numbers, so factor in the probable extra costs here.
Take calls only from clients
During business trips abroad, you might be tempted to answer calls from friends and family to let them know how much sightseeing you have been doing during your breaks from conferences.
However, as clients might also want to call you, prioritise them. Before catching the plane in the first place, tell your friends and relatives not to contact you; they will understand if they know you are just trying to save money. Catch up with them via a low-cost Wi-Fi connection later.
Buy a SIM card local to a foreign country
This tip comes from cartoonist and war correspondent Ted Rall in an article for Forbes. He explains that, if you obtain a SIM card from a local vendor once you are in your destination country, you can make local calls significantly inexpensively.
Nonetheless, it could be tricky to install that card into your current phone. Therefore, you could dig out your previous phone and use that as a second device while on the road.
Investigate international call packages abroad
You could be pleasantly surprised by the packages available in a particular country once you have arrived there. For example, if you are set for a business trip to the United Kingdom, the native telecoms firm Planet Numbers might enable you to make calls back home for just 1p a minute.
The exact per-minute pricing will depend on the country to which you want to call – but you can make cheap international calls to a wide breadth of countries.
