What are the options for businesses?

Basically, there are four possible ways that businesses can offer telephone numbers to their customers:



Advertise their national STD number - As simple as that. Everybody calls that number, and if it's within your included calls period, then it's free. Everybody has the option to keep their call until that time. If this is seen to be a frequent problem, then everybody can opt for an anytime package. If this approach were adopted by all companies, then the anytime package would be a hell of a lot more attractive.



Freephone - e.g. 0800. They pay for this, and it's free to all BT customers. If you have a package from another provider but rent your line seperately from BT, then these would default to BT and so still be free. If you are with a provider that includes your line rental (or it may officially be that the line is free, you only pay for the call package - it amounts to the same thing), then you would need to check your calling plan for how they deal with 0800. I've not done that for anything other than my own plan, so this is an aspect that you may be able to offer more information on. A bit of an empty gesture for customers who could use their inclusive free calling.



Premium rate - in which part of the call charge goes to the business concerned as revenue to them - typically used as the means to pay for gambling, or other pay services when accessed by telephone - often seen on TV competition call lines, or voting lines for TV programmes.



0845 or similar - There are other numbers that work on a similar principle to 0845 - 0870, 0871, 0844, each having a different charge rate to the customer. I feel these are all as undesirable, but as they are not as common as 0845, I have not focussed on them.







There is the option, of course, for a business to offer both of the first two options, as alternatives, so that everybody comes out better off, but they would of course have to review the level of benefit of the freephone option to their customers against the cost to them of providing it, and also, it has significant potential to confuse their customers - without guidance many customers would not know which number to use for their best advantage.





For anybody who wants to look at these options in more detail, here is a link to the BT web page.


http://business.bt.com/phone-services/08-and-09-numbers