If you are thinking of starting a new time and temperature service in your community, there are a number of issues to consider.  In a previous post, we discussed some of the issues involved in taking over a time and temp telephone number previously held by another person or company.  In this post, a discussion of the issues in starting a brand new service.

First – the number of phone lines you'll need.  This decision depends on the size of your community.  As a general rule, one phone line is never enough for any T&T service.  But in very small towns, two lines might be enough.  Your objective as a time and temp operator is to take as many calls as possible – but also to keep callers on the line for as short a time as possible.  For example, there are some T&T services in the northeast run by TV stations.  Naturally, they want their TV weathercasters to be providing the forecast – and sometimes they go into great detail about the forecast.  That's great information to provide, but a 2 minute, detailed forecast ties up the phone line.  The T&T system may have been able to handle several more callers in that time period. Instead, one of the phone lines was tied up, and other callers may have heard a busy signal.

The key to providing a two line T&T service is to keep each caller on the phone for short periods of time – freeing the line for the next caller.  In this way, you can take many more calls – thousands more per month. Keep in mind, of course, that some callers will listen to a portion of the T&T information, then hang up, freeing the line.

As for the phone number in a new T&T service, the key is for the number itself to be memorable – and you may find your options limited.  Many local phone company offices these days receive banks of 1,000 phone numbers to give to new customers. They have to use those numbers before getting the next batch of 1,000.  If the numbers they have available are not memorable you will have to choose the best of what is available or wait for the next batch of 1,000.

In the next post we'll look at how to choose the provider for the telephone lines, and whether VOIP is a viable option.