Is your 0800 freephone number wasted on your mobile customers?

Freephone numbers are a great way of encouraging new sales and marketing calls and it gives companies the opportunity to pay for their customers to contact them. Nothing wrong there and it’s very commendable for companies using these numbers, but what happens when most of your customers are calling your 0800 number from a mobile? The whole freephone element is unfortunately lost and you’ll still be paying for your customers to contact you. With the increase in mobile advertising and mobile browsing, companies need to start looking at the best ways for their customers to contact them. So what’s the best option?

When I currently call a 0800 from my mobile which is on a pay monthly tariff, Vodafone kindly charges me 14 pence per minute to call these freephone numbers. The poor company advertising the freephone number wants me to call for free, I want to call for free and the mobile network gets to charge me a premium for my call so they are winning in this scenario. What the company needs to do is look at switching its freephone number to a 03 number. These new 03 numbers are a great alternative to any 08 number and they tend to be a more customer friendly option when you call them from a mobile. They are charged the same as a geographic number and the call will be included in your ‘free minutes’ package on your mobile tariff.

So, if I made the same call from my Vodafone mobile on an 03 number then the call will be free as its included in my free minutes quota, the company advertising the number will pay less for the incoming call as they are cheaper than freephone numbers. This makes me happy as I don’t end up paying for the call, this makes the company happy as they save money on their inbound calls and more importantly this makes their customers happy as they’re saving money!

That’s why if you are a company and you are advertising on any mobile platform – your mobile website, your mobile PPC campaigns, mobile display or any medium whereby its highly likely that your customers are going to use their mobiles to call you then I would strongly urge you to shift from using a freephone number and switch to a 03 number. You’ll start saving money the moment you switch and you’ll also save your customers a lot of money too.

So until OFCOM manages to change the pricing on the mobile networks to make freefone numbers actually free when you call them from your mobile I would seriously consider looking at your business numbers and how your customers contact you and make sure you have the right number in place for your customers. In this present economic climate where we’re all tightening out budgets any solution that saves you money and your customers has to be the right one.

At Direct Numbers we work with our clients to supply them with the best numbers and call handling services for their business. If you would like more information on our 03 numbers and services then please feel free to contact us.

Omar Shah, Direct Numbers
www.directnumbers.co.uk