How to set up phone numbers for clients?
Hello, I am new to ghl and I am very confused on what the best approach is to setting up phone numbers for my clients. I have chosen to market text back automations and crm functionality to contractors. However, most contractors or small business owners likely have been using their business phone number for a long time and may have it printed on their ads or trucks etc. So what is the best way to go about setting up their number in ghl to where text back automations will send, but their number won't change?
I know there are a couple ways, like there is the import functionality where we can import their phone number into the ghl system and change carriers over to twillio or however ghl does it. However, this is fully changing their carrier and billing info and things like that to where the contractor's current sim card would not work anymore. This import just seems too much of a commitment to fully switch everything over to twillio/ghl and I think it could be a stopping point for many small business owners I would be marketing to. The process also takes weeks.
There is also call/sms forwarding which ghl support told me the owner of the number would have to call their carrier support and have the calls and texts for their number forward to a ghl number that we buy in the onboarding. However, it seems like many/some carriers don't offer this service, and it would add an extra step that the contractor (my client) would have to do instead of me being able to fully onboard them and make it easy for them.
Am I missing something here? Trying to convince a contractor to fully change their business number seems not feasible, but are these the only two options to have their phone number set up with the sms automations I have set up in the ghl system? I just want a way for my clients to mess with their carrier and phone number as little as possible but still integrate the sms automations from ghl?
Any help is highly appriciated.