NGMsGhost wrote on Nov 9^th, 2006 at 5:28pm:

And I'll give you one guess which credit card company I use.

In response to NGM's ghost posting....

VoIP is an exciting development for the industry and for businesses alike, however to just assume that businesses can simply adopt VoIP straight away into their call handling processes it somewhat naive.  Most businesses have already incurred expense of installing expensive phone systems and the pain and cost of change, whilst VoIP is still undergoing yet further development (the quality is not yet up to the standard of circuit switched telephony) is difficult to justify in most cases.  You also need to consider the fact that many business VoIP systems are particularly feature rich and can require significant technical knowledge to get them to work the way they are intended to.  We all know the problems we face day to day with PC's, many VoIP applications and systems bring with them similar technical challenges for the user.  Whilst many companies that have come into the telco arena with VoIP offerings sing the praises of the technology, as they would do, the fact is that it is not an adequately reliable and high quality solution at this point in time.  If anyone out there has had problems in the past with their broadband link, which no doubt is most of you, you'll understand that if a business relies of VoIP connected by a broadband service, they will have no phones each time that broadband service fails!  This is a key reason why businesses have yet to embrace VoIP.  In addition to this, as margins are squeezed and squeezed more and more in the telco industry, which has benefitted consumers massively, there will be less and less competition in the market place and development will be stifled.  You can't expect change overnight, the same businesses that are getting lambasted as greedy and profiteering are also those that are paying salaries of hundreds of thousands of us. 

Changes were definately due, and the industry on the whole put forward lots of very good ideas for change which provided for price transparency for the consumer, simplified numbering and greater opportunity for businesses to manage their calls and lower their costs.  Ofcom pretty much ignored all these proposals, choosing instead to stick with their own proposals which practice don't work technically, don't provide price transparency in the way we would all like, leave the door open to further scams and give business a major headache to boot! 

In any case, it is too late to change this ruling now and we all have to work with it.  Businesses need to wake up to these changes and start planning now.  I think consumers can expect quite a few organisations to struggle with managing the change and the impact this will have on their call handling performance for the next few years will inevitably have a knock on effect on the consumer.  We are all set for deeper confusion in the years to come and perhaps when the ruling comes into effect Ofcom will realise that they have made some serious errors with these changes that are largely unsatisfactory for everyone other than BT.

0870advice.com wrote on Nov 9^th, 2006 at 7:12pm:


OK its clear that unlike some other NGN vendors who have posted here you do have a good understanding of the bigger picture and are a relatively intelligent and also fair minded person and so I think have been rather unfairly pilloried by some other forum members since you clearly haven't tried to insult our intelligence by claiming that 0845 and 0870 are local/national rate etc.  Nonetheless the website of the company you appear to be involved with does give us cause for concern on that score.

You must surely accept that 0845 and 0870 would never have been adopted by business in the way they have been if they hadn't been repeatedly sold the lie that it was a "free meal" where they got a revenue share or subsidised phone equipment and allegedly their callers still only paid local or national rate.  Unfortunately this was never ever true and became less and true over the years and in the end even for those residential phone customers lazy enough never to have moved away from BT.  Also the fact that the market cost of calls in 084/7 is driven not by consumers trying to lower them but instead by the call centre industry and their clients trying to outbid each other to offer or receive a higher and higher revenue share deal.

The solution we all here believe should have happened is that 08 should have been returned to Freephone only use and revenue sharers given the choice only of moving to 09 with full ICSTIS price disclosure (not the outrageous watered down form for 0871 that Ofcom Toady ICSTIS have now proposed) or moving to 03 where your clients pay the extra cost of call redirection and call features etc but at least they as large players are in a position to force the current disraceful prices charged for NGN convenience (not least to 0800 users if they have no feature at all other than the billing being reversed)

Matt Peacock Communications Director of Ofcom was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 You & Yours in Nov 2004 and claimed 084/7 call centre operators would be forced to publish the geographic alternatives by Ofcom as a minimum but that never happened and Ofcom allowing 0845 revenue share to carry on when it is mainly used by the charitable and public sector for voice calls is nothing short of a total outrage.  By Feb 2008 there will only be modest 0845 dial up traffic left and it should all have been forced to migrate to lower cost 0844 or 0808 solutions.  Anything that forced it to move in the direction of broadband would in any case have been a good thing.

I presume your preferred solution would possibly be that 0845 and 0870 became charged at geographic rates and 0844 and 0871 range users would be forced to migrate to a proper 09 code prefix?

However with reference to the alleged difficulties of these call centres changing number I really think this is a load of nonsense as new number ranges can be introduced and publicised straight away and the old number ranges being closed are merely then kept going for 6 or 9 months and then withdrawn after leaflets and stationery have changed.  The whole history of the big national number change from 0 to 01 preficed dialling codes and London changing from 01 to 0171 and 0181 and then to 020 shows that such parallel running for a cutover period is pretty straight forward to manage in practice.

The only real reason your clients make excuses about the difficulties of changing numbers to be quite blunt is because they don't want to give up the revenue share.

As to BT.  BT speak with forked tongue and Iain Livingston says the whole of 084 and 087 is a scam that must go while the BT response to the 0871 ICSTIS Pre-Consultation says the scam proposals there for a new hidden trojan premium rate class are perfectly acceptable.  The big corporate side of BT wants to claim it is there for the public but the scamming side of BT that has just introduced a 20% price hike in 01/02 call prices wants to go on raking is as high level of profit as it can.

But I repeat some forum members have been rather unfair to you because you are clearly trying to have an intelligent debate with us rather than just simply trying to pretend that 084/7 numbers are the only basis on which it is now possible to operate large UK call centres.

Thank you for your acknowledgement!  I'll answer a few of your points before signing off....

People that run businesses are smart people (for the most part) and selling lies to them results in one thing....very few sales !  I disagree with your point here and would say that virtually all businesses are fully aware of what the caller is paying to call their business!  The fact is that the regulatory environment has allowed for this and businesses owners have made decissions based on finance, which is a plain fact of life commercial approach of most business owners... keep costs down, increase revenue, increase profits, maximise resources etc.!  The only way those of us working for a private enterprise will get a salary is if that business is making a profit.  The regulatory environment has allowed for the growth in the use of 0870 whether this is right or wrong, its not the fault of the business owners, they are following basic business principles. 

I disagree that 0870 / 0845 were never national / local rate, they were infact tied to the BT standard national and local rate up until quite recently, although non discountable.  The problem for an organisation in publishing geographic numbering is that it is so inflexible with respect to growth or relocation.  Management information is hard to gain, and its difficult to manage call flow and the callers experience without significant hardware investment.  Whether it is right or wrong, the flexibity offered by NGN's is the major contributory factor to the growth in their use.  Revenue share is rarely the key driver and is normally a drop in the ocean compared with the savings a business realises by maximising staff and infrastructure resources.  It is simply not possible to get the same level of call handling performance using geographic numbering versus non geographic numbering.  Business owners can gain all the benefits of NGN's with freephone, but simple business principles tend to apply and many decide that rather than pay many thousands of pounds to receive calls, they will generate an income which they can then invest back into call handling efficiency, possibly more staff too!  This may sound one sided but in my experience this is the most common approach from a business, they all want to receive more calls and answer them more quickly so they can sell you more stuff.  In an ideal world every business would pay for us all to call them, but that can put strain on an enterprise because it often encourages lots of time waster calls, which is more of a problem in terms of the staff time wasted (which is expensive) versus funding the cost of the call.  Many organisations choose to use higher charging NGN's as a deterrant to time waster calls where information a caller may require can be found on a website or in a manual. 

Can you remember back to the old days when you would try to reach an organisation who would be constantly engaged?  They didn't even know how many people where trying to reach them and it would drive you crazy that you couldn't get through without countless redialling.  How often does this happen now when you try to reach a business that uses 08 numbers? 

My preferred solution would actually be a very simple and transparent approach to the numbering scheme, which would be easy for the public to recognise from the number they are dialling exactly what they are paying for the call, whilst at the same time giving lots of choice to the business owner for the band of charge the caller pays v's revenue stream they do / don't receive.  Such as the following

080X   = Free to Caller
081X   = 1ppm to Caller
082X   = 2ppm to Caller
083X   = 3ppm to Caller
084X   = 4ppm to Caller
085X   = 5ppm to Caller
086X   = 6ppm to Caller
087X   = 7ppm to Caller
088X   = 8ppm to Caller
089X   = 9ppm to Caller

Such a numbering scheme is straight forward and transparent, provides a breadth of choice for businesses, provides the industry with opportunity to further develop services and help businesses manage their customer calls, requires little change from the current numbering scheme, provides minimal disruption to business and could be backed up with the 03XX range for public bodies.  Remember I am saying this would be my preferred approach, I don't expect you guys to agree to it, but I'm sure you can see how easy it would be for the consumer to know exactly what they are paying for a call.  We would all like all our calls to be free, but that is never going to happen so long as the telco industry employs people that need to feed their children etc. 

The changing numbers problem is real.  Many businesses will have to respray vehicle fleets, most will have to reprint stationary but the biggest problem is that numbers stay in the public domain for a long time....for example, numbers printed on tins of paint, packaging, warrentees, catalogues etc. can often be dialled years after they are printed and a business has relocated.  This is why it is so important for businesses to avoid changing numbers if at all possible.  Changes in the big number change are somewhat different as it involved a universal change to just the prefix. 

I agree that numbers with a high call charge should be premium rated and possibly fall under the 09 prefix, the problem here again is that this numbering system is not clear to the caller with so many bands its impossible to tell from the prefix (unless you are Rain Man!) what the call will cost!

. . . . Interesting debate, I agree Businesses should be allowed 0870 numbers (Sorry Guys) But I also have a stronger belief that Customers should not have to pay stupid prices (Up to 40 PPM from mobiles) to call banks/ISP's etc when they dont need to, simply by using this website to find the geographical number... I think OFCOM should make companies publicise the price of these calls as many people are vulnerable and do not understand the 087* numbers CAN cost more than the dreaded 090 numbers!!!

I also think that if businesses want more trade (Or at least mine and a few other forum members who have stated the same) they should give there geographical number out on request or even publish it... I personally would choose an ISP that gives me a geo/0800 number over an ISP with an 0871 number. (Some ISP's (And I emphasise the word SOME) use 0871 numbers to offset the cost of forwarding the calls to india and keeping jobs in the UK to a minimum!!!)

Or even better, ask customers what number they would want to ring, an 087* number that is supposed to make the company look professional or a geographical number that everybody has anyway!!! (INCLUDING THE COMPANIES WITH THE 087* NUMBERS) or a number that looks a little less professional (In some peoples opinion) and it would cost them 0-5ppm max???

Sorry if I am off topic or dont sound like I know what I am saying, I am new to this and would like to post my personal opinion

Edited:

0870advice.com wrote on Nov 9^th, 2006 at 11:37pm:


I don't think it is necessarily the phone number that is achieving that, but cheaoer and better equipment.

But it doesn't all work properly - just try calling the Inland Revenue some time. The Livingston office has no details of my affairs as they only deal with people in Scotland, so one wonders why the phone system connects the call several hundred miles instead of to 3 miles away, which a local number might manage more easily

And the Halifax found that it was impossible to connect me to the right department, and the clever phone system three times transferred me back to the same place. In the end a manager called me back. In January 95 they had only 10 people in the call centre for telephone banking, and no call queues at all.

Let us look at Vodafone Passport in most major EU countries:-

01/02 calls - a flat 75p per call then calls out of bundled minutes on contract or at your prevailing PAYG tariff from 5p to 30p per minute depending on time of day and tariff.

0870 calls - 99p per minute at all times.

A 1 hour call to 0870 might costs just 75p.  A 1 hour call to 0870 would cost £59"

It seems to me entirely realistic to worry about the premium rate surcharges charged for these numbers from other EU countries when numbers such as credit card loss notification lines often use 0870.  Also given that NEG expects you to use an 0870 number to contact their doctor surgery clients from overseas this again appears to be an entirely valid comparison.

Also back in the UK let us look at Vodafone Stop the Clock on PAYG which lets you call an 01/02 number for up to 60 minutes for the cost of 3 minutes after 7.30pm at night and all weekend on some PAYG tariffs. This will usually total either 15p or 30p for the call for one hour depending on the Stop the Clock qualifying tariff you are on.  But 084/7 numbers will go on being charged per minute and are excluded from Stop the Clock and will cost between £3.00 and £6.00 per hour depending on the qualifying Stop the Clock tariff you are on.  A price differential between 084/7 and other call tariffs of a staggering 2000%  These differential levels of charging cannot possibly be justified and there isn't even an announcement to tell you which calls do and which calls do not qualify for Stop The Clock.

Tmobile's special tariffs page for Pay As You Go does not explain whether or not they regard 084/7 as being "special tariff numbers" and if so which kind.  Their main price page for Pay As You Go also fails to clarify whether they regard 084/7 as special rate calls or not.

trubster wrote on Nov 10^th, 2006 at 1:58am:


You will want to consider www.aceinternet.co.uk who have just published their 0161 number for technical support calls and provided SIP to SIP and other Voip to Voip free internet call alternatives to using the PSTN.