Hi there,
I was suggested this site from my brother as I'd never heard of it before but think its a great idea.

Hence,
I have added the 01 number for our own 0800 number to the listing.

I have a question for others though,
We are doing some local advertising and have been showing the 0800 number, then we tried the 01483 number and now we use both !

what do you suggest would appeal to you (if you lived in the 01483 area) ?

0800
01483
or show both

I'd be glad to know so please help me out.
many thanks
Shaun.

I suggest both too, but put a note next to the numbers as to which number callers should use. Remember calls to your 0800 number cost your business the same regardless of where the call comes from or whether it benefits the caller or not.

Calls from landlines are free to 0800 numbers, but for customers with a packages where calls to 01 numbers are included at no extra charge (so are free anyway), there would be no benefit for them to call 0800, so it would be preferable if you could dissuade callers in this case.

So in essence, the only benefit financially to the caller of calling a 0800 number is for those on landline packages where calls are chargeable.

Mobile providers can charge more to call 0800 than calling 01 numbers, remember we are living in rip off Britain!

It's up to you how you word this, just informing you how it works.

You definitely need to show both numbers.

0800 is best for anyone calling from a home landline as the call is free of charge to them by that route.

But unfortunately due to the ineptitude of Ofcom 0800 has been allowed to be charged at a premium rate from both mobiles (where it is excluded from bundled minutes on contracts and charged at a much higher rate than normal calls by some Pay As You Go operators like Tmobile) and also for International calls.  Someone in the USA could call a UK 01 or 02 number for the equivalent of less than a penny a minute with the cheapest carrier but calling an 0800 number might cost them 30p per minute or more with the same carrier.

The best way to do it is probably to quote your 0800 number slightly more prominently in the advert and then show the 01 number in international calling format eg +44 1306 787549.  And anyone who has a UK mobile rather than calling from abroad can actually even key in the number in that format on their mobile and it will work (all mobiles have a + key for the international access code on them somewhere.)

I suppose you could should "if you are calling from a landline" against your 0800 number and "if you are calling from a mobile or overseas" against the 01 number but perhaps that might over complicate things.  Most customers who care which number they are calling will be aware which numbers they should use in most circumstances and I think most people know that 0800 numbers are not free and can be very expensive to call from a mobile phone.

Many thanks for all your replies.

By the sounds of it we ought to use both, so we'll continue with that.

It seems the whole idea of the 0800 freephone is a dying breed.  So many people use their mobile all the time or have inclusive minutes on their landline that I can't see the long term benefit - but the whole idea was to save the customer the cost of the call !

So here we are a company operating in 2007 and trying to give our customers the chance to talk to us for free and we have these hurdles to climb over.

I could just put in a 0870 number at 25ppm but would I get less calls ? who knows.  But were not out to rip off our customers so we continue to offer the 0800 to those who can use it and wish them well.

thanks again,
Shaun.

a very nice man wrote on Jan 10^th, 2007 at 8:09am:
Call08.com offer 500mins (not 800mins) for £5 per month and incoming calls thereafter are charged at 2p/min.

As far as I'm aware, Call08.com are the cheapest supplier of freephone numbers out there.

Also, on some occasions it's possible to port your number from your current supplier to other suppliers.

Current information is that they will only give you 500 mins, and as such I stand corrected.
However, when I took out my contract on 26 Feb 06, I was supplied with 800 mins, with email confirmation, but agree I should have used more recent info before offering an opinion.