New 08XX; number regulations; understanding what's across digital landscape

01 Apr 2014

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The communications regulator Ofcom has announced that charges for telephone calls to business and services are to be made simpler, with clearer pricing for all numbers starting 08, 09 and 118. Under the new plans, 080 ‘freephone’ numbers will be free from mobiles as well as landlines.

The new proposals, scheduled to be in place by the middle of 2015, are significant and the biggest changes for UK telephone customers for more than a decade. Aimed at restoring people’s confidence in using phone services and increasing competition, they will mean businesses need to plan to make changes to existing contact numbers on websites and other forms of online marketing.

As a result, all businesses will need to closely look at their ‘digital landscape’ – comprising web, social and mobile sites - to ensure that their customer-facing marketing includes the right numbers to comply with the new rules, so the correct charges are made.

Sitemorse is helping businesses respond to the changes by highlighting telephone number content. Website owners who have sites with large numbers of web pages and contact numbers will be able to see everything they have online to ensure it complies with the detail of the new regulation – and to make sure it remains compliant with the new rules.

Services provided by Sitemorse can spot things human web managers can miss, and can save hours and days of the time it would take to scan large numbers of web pages manually. Working with clients, we have found that they are often unaware of more than 40 per cent of their web estate, as sites may have been set up by subsidiaries, agents, for special projects or may have been forgotten – so it’s essential that any business knows exactly what it has online and can demonstrate an ‘audit trail’.

Sitemorse CEO Lawrence Shaw says the responsibility will be with businesses to make sure that all their communications reflect the new rules. Both published and online information will need to be carefully checked and monitored to ensure the rules are followed and that outdated advice or telephone numbers are not given to consumers.

“This will mean a big task for businesses, which may have a digital presence of many thousands of web domains and individual web pages that will need to be compliant. Keeping track of everything you have online is more than ever essential, so it’s good that services such as those provided by Sitemorse to do the hard work of ensuring online content is both correct and monitored on an ongoing basis.” he added.

Virtually every consumer and company in the country uses service numbers in some way. People use them to call businesses and Government agencies, make payments for services and vote on TV shows. Currently, unless they are using a BT line, callers to these numbers are not generally informed how much they will be charged. Under Ofcom’s new rules, telephone users calling service numbers will in future see the cost broken down into an ‘access charge’ to their phone company, plus a ‘service charge’ to the company or organisation they are calling.

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