armandoebuyer wrote on Dec 8
th, 2009 at 5:53pm:
This is Armando Sanchez with Ebuyer I see some of you are trying to speak to me. I've been reading through this post and can see that some of you have gone to a lot of trouble to get hold of us by using a local number. We sincerely do not want to upset our customers for 10p a minute, as we value your business very much.
Because of this I'm looking into this matter as it might be something we will eliminate going forward. We may possibly look into removing the 0871 number from Ebuyer, this may take a few months to look into so please bear with me. In the mean time you can use this number to get through to Ebuyer customer service at a local rate, so your not being bounced around all over the place 01430 433605.
This is just to confirm that the number provided by Armando at Ebuyer still worked perfectly today (January 11th 2012) and I got through very quickly to first a call adviser and then a supervisor who explained extremely comprehensively how their various different shipping and delivery choices worked (there is a choice from 1 to 5 days plus a free 5 day delivery option on small packages over £50) and who the courier used (Parcelforce) normally was and whether goods could arrive quicker than 5 days on the 5 day service in practice.
My main disappointment is that Ebuyer have not yet moved to showing an 01, 02 or 03 prefixed number as standard in place of their 0871 number as Armando suggested might happen.
However I also find it extremely disappointing that Ebuyers marketing personnel currently seem to deliberately abuse the spirit if not the letter of PhonePayPlus's call price disclosure rules for 0871 numbers by not publishing the call cost of the number at the top of their Contact Us page where the large 0871 number is shown and instead hide it at the bottom of the Contact Us page that only customers who scroll down that far will notice. I intend to raise this matter with Phone Pay Plus as a potential breach of the current regulatory requirements.
idlehanz wrote on Dec 8
th, 2009 at 6:14pm:
Strategically, it's probably to your benefit to maintain your 0871xxxx number(s) to keep some revinue streams and not upset the balance of your company so much. As otherwise I'm sure your customers will see the short fall added in small extra margins on products.
As to Idelhanz'c above comments I am afraid I do not agree that these days people do not wish to speak to call centres for advice and in reality they are usually also forced in to calling them because a website's FAQs often does not properly cover their issues (as with my issues on Ebuyers delivery methods) and/or an emailed query is not responded to within a reasonable time frame such as only a few hours.
I am afraid that to me Idlehanz sounds like a card carrying apologist for the operators of call centres using 084/7 and especially 0844 and 0871 prefixed numbers all of whom always claim that most customers don't actually want to call them any more as one of their standard excuses for using these numbers. But if that was actually true then why would it be necessary to charge a covert premium rate at all to either put customers off calling or to cover part of the cost of them calling if almost nobody uses the telephone to contact customers services any more
I think Idlehanz is quite clearly in reality someone who does not like customers apart apparently from him/herself ringing call centres and who prefers to put them off doing so or charge extra for them doing so but faced with the prospect that a customer might not call at all (especially as this in case a sale might be lost) he perhaps grudgingly has to concede that the geographic alternative number being published on a site like
www.saynoto0870.com that only NTS revenue share resistant customers will be aware of is a compromise he/she can live with.