Moving Office and Can’t Keep Your Phone Number? Yes You Can!

We have hundreds of people talking to us who are moving office and have been told that “as you are moving outside your exchange you can’t take your number with you”.  Up until about 12 months ago this was true but as technology has advanced so has the flexibility of moving with your number.

If your business is moving location and needs to keep its existing landline phone number the process to enable you to move this is simple.  You can be moving from London to Birmingham and keep your London phone number, it doesn’t matter if you are moving outside of the exchange or not. When a business moves office it doesn’t necessarily think about if it can keep its number until right at the very end of the process.  By this time it is almost too late to do anything about it and they end up having a “we have moved and our new phone number is” message played for at least a year costing them a fortune.  What happens after a year?  Lots of their customers or potential customers could still be calling them (it is common knowledge that a yellow pages has a shelf life of at least 18 months).

The answer is simple.

If you currently have a BT landline number, are moving out of the exchange and have been told you have to change your number – Firstly, don’t panic!  Call us on our Free Phone 0800 number and we will explain how you can keep your number.  We will port the number to our network and you will be able to control where you point your number to.  With this solution you can keep your landline phone number so that you don’t miss any calls from your customers or potential customers ever!

This solution costs a one off £50 to port the existing numbers to us (this cost is for 1 number to 50 numbers inclusive), £3 per number per month rental and any calls you receive on the phone number will be charged at 3p per minute.

We have helped hundreds of companies save their phone number when moving offices.  If you need any help about this please feel free to call us.

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Change my 0870 number

It’s only 31 working days until the 1st of August and for anyone out there with a 0870 number this is an important date to circle in your calendar.  The 1st of August will mean that you will have to pay for every call received on your 0870 number.

Following years of consultation the industry regulator has forced the price for calling 0870 numbers down so that they only cost a true national rate to call.  In turn this means that any revenue generated from your 0870 numbers will STOP and you will more than likely be charged for receiving the call.  We have seen quotes in the market for calls costing between 2p and 3p per minute.

Let us give you an example of a typical 0870 number customer at the moment and after the 1st of August:-

Pre 1st August 2009Existing customer with a 0870 number that receives 1000 calls per month, each call lasts 2 minutes. This customer would receive a payment for calls received of about £60

Post 1st August 2009 Existing customer with an 0870 number that receives 1000 calls per month, each call lasts 2 minutes. This customer would be charged for calls received of about £60

This is a swing of £120 that you will lose out of your cash flow!

We are already migrating customers away from 0870 numbers who wish to keep the revenue share for calls received onto 0844 numbers.  0844 numbers will pay you about 1.5p per minute for every call received.  Some people are moving to 0871 numbers (these pay you about 5p per minute) but they are heavily regulated by phonepayplus and you will have to inform your customers of the cost to call and not delay the call in any way.

The easy way to change 0870 number

It’s not going to be an easy job to do this.  Your 0870 numbers is more than likely all over your website, cars, vans, stationery, business cards, emails and quotes.

This is why we have put together a recorded message package for you to ease the pain.  If you change your 0870 number to one of our 0844 numbers we will build a recorded message for your 0870 number saying “our number has changed to 0844 xxx xxxx please call back using our new number and amend your records”.  To top this off we will build this message for you FREE OF CHAGE.  No monthly fee, annual fee or call cost for the recording – TOTALLY FREE!

If you would like to speak to one of our team about your 0870 problem please feel free to call us on 0845 3 666 555.  We will be happy to help you resolve this issue quickly!

When it comes to numbers – we like to help!

 

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Local Area Phone Numbers

More and more companies are now choosing local area numbers to promote their business. This blog explains the difference between local area numbers and 0800 numbers or 0845 numbers.

Local area numbers allow companies to advertise a local phone number even if they are not based in that location. For example we have a company that advertises a 0161 Manchester number to attract customers from Manchester.  They are based in Birmingham and have no local presence in Manchester but the local number encourages people to call as they believe that they are just around the corner.

Customers are becoming more selective about their suppliers and we are finding that people are choosing to buy from local companies than the larger more faceless organisations.  Modern technology has allowed companies like ours to provide these virtual local phone numbers and have them pointed to your existing phone number (we can point our numbers to UK landlines, Mobiles or international numbers).  It’s not only the local phone number that is the attraction of this service it is the real-time call stats and return on investment analysis that we provide.

How does this work I hear you shout?  Easy!  Let’s say that you are a company based in London and wanted to advertise in the Midlands.  We would provide you with a 0121 Birmingham Virtual Phone Number, 01902 Wolverhampton Virtual Phone Number and 02476 Coventry Virtual Phone Number.  Each of these phone numbers would route to your existing office and you would place the numbers in different adverts making you look local.  Every time someone called you from one of these adverts your phone would ring and we could play an announcement saying “this is a call from your virtual Birmingham phone number”, this would allow you to know instantly that your advert is working.  That’s not all!  All of our numbers come with an impressive online tool that allows you to manage where your virtual number is pointed and view real time call statistics.

Virtual Phone Numbers are not a 2nd grade service and you will not notice any difference between the number we supply you and any other traditional landline. UK Virtual numbers are commonly known as AREACALL NUMBERS, GHOST NUMBERS and REMOTE CALL FORWARD NUMBERS – call them what you like but the benefits of portraying your business as local will put a smile on your face!

If you are interested in the areas of the UK that we supply phone numbers in please click here – Virtual Phone Numbers.

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0800 Numbers close to extinction

0800 Numbers have been in existence for years and have been mainly used by large, corporate organisations.  This has changed over the last decade with more smaller companies using 0800 numbers to attract customers.  The issue with this fast growth is that there is a limited stock of 0800 numbers available.  Back in the 1990’s Mercury Communications (now Cable & Wireless) were allocated 0500 numbers which were in direct competition to BT’s 0800 numbers.  Both of these number ranges were only 6 digits long i.e. 0800 xxxxxx.  Oftel (the regulator at the time – now Ofcom) had to increase the number of digits available in a number to 7 which increased the amount of 0800 numbers in stock.  0500 numbers are still free to call and are popular with the BBC (Watchdog has 0500 600 700 and Radio 5 Live has 0500 909 693).  There was a rumor that 0500 numbers would be phased out but this has subsided.

So what is the reason for this 0800 numbers blog then?

We just wanted to highlight the fact to you all that 0800 numbers will eventually run out.

What does this mean for you I hear you say?

Don’t worry the UK regulator Ofcom have issued a new number range for when we eventually run out of 0800 numbers.  In fact this new number range (0808 numbers) has been around for a few years.  Not many people are aware that 0808 numbers are free to call and this blog is to highlight the fact that 0808 numbers are free to call from all UK landlines.  0808 numbers will not replace 0800 or 0500 numbers, all the number ranges will work together as free to call numbers.

 

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