Any business that wants to expand needs to build a presence not only in its local area but across the entire country. If your firm is lumbered with a contact number that is indicative of your company’s location, however, this can prove to be a hindrance in your quest for national domination. Customers expect to be able to call a national or local number when contacting a major firm.
There are a number of options available to those companies that want to secure a UK-wide presence overnight, so you just need to pick the one which is right for your business and then reap the benefits further down the line.
National numbers come in a number of different formats. Provided below are some of the main options available.
Freephone
Obtaining a freephone number for your business has a number of benefits, the first of which is that it will be non-geographic, allowing your company to appear to have a national reach in a way that might not be obvious with a standard local landline number.
The second benefit is that customers will feel far more able to approach your business if you have a freephone number because they know that they will not be charged for doing so when using a landline connection of their own.
Freephone numbers can markedly increase sales figures within a business and will help to make you look approachable to people from across the UK.
National
A freephone number is good, but the problem is that in an increasingly mobile world there are fewer consumers who can actually take advantage of its cost-saving benefits.
This is because mobile network providers tend to charge people for calling 0800 numbers and other freephone lines using a portable handset.
A good way around this issue is to use a standard national landline number that will not indicate the geographic location of your company and will also make it possible for mobile users to call your business without incurring significant charges.
Because pay-monthly tariffs typically allow for a set number of inclusive minutes to be used calling mobile and landline numbers each month, contacting your company via a national number will allow customers to get through this allocation rather than paying more on top of their existing monthly tariff.
National numbers are still going to be attractive for callers using landlines, as they will be charged at a reasonable rate and they too could have a package built into their phone tariff which means that the fees are eliminated.
Premium Rate
One of the popular national number options follows the traditional premium rate model. This is a sensible choice for a business that wants to generate money based on the calls it receives.
Consumers are used to having to pay call charges on particular types of calls. While a premium rate number is not an ideal choice if you are trying to make a sale, it might be suitable for something like customer services and support when you are actively having to fund call centre staff and the infrastructure to keep everything up and running.
The good thing about all of these types of national, non-geographic numbers is that you can set them up for your business with relative ease, generating a national presence in as little time as possible.
Tapping into the wider market in the UK is the best way of becoming sustainable and prosperous as a company, but without the right kind of national number you will find this more difficult to achieve, so growing businesses ought to adopt this strategy sooner rather than later.
Daisy Group plc have over 12 years experience in providing telephony and connectivity solutions to small medium and corporate businesses across the UK. Daisy’s offers non geographic phone numbers and call handling solutions helping businesses improve customer communication, drive efficiency, increase business and impliment disaster recover planning.