Expensive phone lines
Expensive phone lines? No, I’m not referring to those for porn chat lines … I’m referring to those with the prefixes 08457 and 0807, where the businesses that use them make money out of you while you’re kept waiting to be served.
“All our lines are busy at the moment.” “There is currently a wait of ……… 5 minutes … before we will be able to answer your call. You may wish to call back at a less busy time”. “Your call is important to us” … i.e. your money is important to us … or the long rigmarole of selecting the right department to answer your call, by keying in a succession of numbers, that you’ll all be familiar with. Even worse is where the company cuts you off if they’re too busy … “Please phone back at another time”, and the line goes dead. Another practice is where they often put in some advertising of one of their services, while you’re waiting … and you are paying to listen to it.
Don’t you find it irritating, to put it mildly?
A few weeks ago, someone wrote into The Guardian and suggested searching online to find a cheaper phone number for a large business. These are often published for people phoning from abroad.
So if you see phone numbers for London with the prefix +44 207 or +44 208, simply use a 0 instead of the +44.
This worked very well when I contacted National Insurance about my voluntary pension contributions recently. I got through to the help desk in record time, but the guy at the other end was very puzzled as to why I wasn’t calling from abroad. Perhaps I should have said that I was living in Costa del Nottingham? Given how the climate is changing here in the East Midlands, it won’t be long before we’ll be growing orange, lemon, olive and palm trees … so we won’t have to fly to Southern Spain or the French Riviera for some decent sunshine … we’ll enjoy the sunshine here instead.
Sorry to ramble on, but to come back to phone lines again, I’m always pleased to see a Freephone number, even though the costs for this are passed on to the customer in the end. I was amazed how good the service was when I phoned up the BT Business Phone and Broadband service in the last week or so. As their lines were busy, I was invited to leave my phone number for a call back from one of their sales staff, which they did within a few minutes. I phoned them again yesterday for some advice on free webspace (BT offers 20MB of free webspace with a business phone line), and was put through to their technical help desk free of charge – the people I spoke to were very helpful and friendly. Brilliant. As you will know, BT is fairly expensive compared with some of the other phone companies, but I reckon you get the service you pay for.
I was interested to see in The Guardian recently, a freephone number for the TV licensing people. Instead of paying for an 0870 number, you could try this one instead … O800 0850 133.
