BrianMore wrote on May 17^th, 2007 at 11:20am:

Welcome BrianMore.

Pleased as I am (and your customers will be) to hear of the ditching of the 0870 number, the 'we never took a %' bit rings a little hollow.  Who did then?  Someone did.

Anyway, having read your assertion that the use of an 0870 number was because it was more memorable than your geographical number, I thought I'd click on your link and see what your geographical number is now.

Clicking on the Contact Us tab took me to a page on which an address is easy to find - but no phone number. 

Now that's annoying.

Scrolling down, I found an Our telephone numbers: Are in the how to contact us section link but clicking that did not immediately show me a phone number.

Now that's annoying.

Scrolling down (again), I had to scan-read looking for a likely number string before I found 0114 292 2930.

Now that's ANNOYING.

So, I eventually found your geographical number - 0114 292 293 0.  Presented in that way, it's relatively easy to remember - far more so, IMHO, than 0870 043 4182 or 08700 43 41 82.

Hi Brian

This is an excellent example of a company finding out what its customers think and acting accordingly.  You will probably do more business that way.  I wish the banks and government departments etc would do the same.

Hi pw4,

Thanks for the information, pw4.

You say that your organisation has 50 or so revenue sharing numbers and that the revenue it received is a comparatively insignificant amount.   But you telecom provider has pocketed a tidy sum over the period and your organisation has (unwittingly ?) cost your callers a significant amount of money. 

What sort of organisation is it?

Do you intend to change to 01-02 numbers, or the new 03 number?

BrianMore wrote on May 17^th, 2007 at 4:59pm:


I still think there has to be scope to strike back against the 0870 telecoms company shysters, both for companies like yourselves that were conned by not getting a revenue share and by callers of the number persistently told 0870 was National Rate only to find it was covert Premium Rate, especially from mobiles.

The total amounts involved are huge and although the amount for each retail phone customer ripped off is not quite as big as for the banks the amount for a company using 0870 and getting no revenue share are potentially huge.

If it can be done for bank charges there has to be a way it can be done for 084 and 087 numbers using fair trading legislation of one form and another.

NGMsGhost wrote on May 21^st, 2007 at 5:20pm:

I wish I had the legal expertise to attack this.

From a background in retail, it feels like the Telecoms arena badly needs a dose of the consumer legislation introduced in the late 60s/early 70s, such as the Sale of Goods Act, Unfair Contract Terms Act and whichever Act introduced the OFT

As I understand it, before the introduction of some or all of those 3, it was pretty much the wild west - retailers could put a ticket on an item saying £1 each and then charge you £10 each, OR pretend something had been reduced when it had never been sold at the higher price, and many other scams. Nowadays, whilst far from perfect, laws prevent that sort of blatant deception.

Unfortunately it seems telecoms companies are able to dodge all that consumer protection, as they are only answerable to their fellow schemers at OFCOM (Trading Standards Offices seem to refuse to get involved because OFCOM is supposed to be the regulator). OFCOM of course is answerable to no-one

I did manage to get £5 out of BT about a year ago, after I kicked and screamed about 0845 items labelled on my bill as LOCAL RATE, so it can be done, but it's a painful process. They've since changed that wording as well

pw4 wrote on May 25^th, 2007 at 1:11pm:

I assume callers are therefore contributors. 

If so, why waste part of their contributions by changing to 03 numbers (calls to which the charity will almost certainly have to part-fund).

Why not just change to 01/02 numbers?

Why not use soft (e.g. SIPgate, VoIP etc) numbers that one can pick up anywhere? No need to redirect and so on.