OFCOM regulation has been updated, relating to the use of non-geographical telephone numbers. Phone lines that can be used by customers to make enquiries / complaints after a sale must be charged at no more than the ‘basic rate’. The government’s guidance says this means not only no 09 numbers but also no 0845 or 0870 numbers even though these are commonly used by businesses as “local rate” numbers. These rules apply even to general enquiry lines if consumers for post-contract queries use these - an essential part of content (and Digital) Governance should be to ensure future publishing of such telephone numbers is challenged.

OFCOM states “The changes will all come into place on the same day, 1 July 2015.”
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/simplifying-non-geo-no/

To support clients Sitemorse understands and continually, comprehensively catalogues every element of every asset, on every page on every one of your digital properties (web, social and mobile) this includes the use of telephone numbers – not just on web pages but within PDF, Word, PowerPoint and Excel content, our automation significantly helping you to demonstrate your Digital Governance.

We have a short video available to assist https://secure.sitemorse.com/video.html?v=telephone

The staged approach offered on the coming pages could also be useful for completing any content remediation exercise – change of brand name, logo, product or service - for clients who have fully deployed our 3rd Generation service there should be limited if any manual searching, remediation reporting or on-going content assessment required.

Consider a Staged Approach?

2.1 Stage 1 – understand

Initially the first task is to understand exactly what numbers you have across the differing page types (web, social, mobile – PDF and office docs).

Using Sitemorse, this detail can be found within the Inventory section (Dashboard > Inventory> Tel numbers)

 

2.2 Stage 2 – prioritise

Once the detail as to the actual use of numbers is available, next is to look at remediation. For clients that have deployed the 3rd Generation service this is can be automated with Sitemorse mapping the discovered numbers and based on consumption of the content, frequency of page update, organisation value of the page and the order as to which updates should be applied is provided.

2.3 Stage 2 – remediation

Against a prioritised list (after all if no one reads a particular PDF there is limited value in updating the number here in the initial remediation round) each instance of number usage should be action. Sitemorse workflow automates the distribution process (if implemented) improving efficiency significantly. We also track time taken for individuals to complete the update.

Example of the detailed offered to remediation staff – top image showing the details of the PDF containing the number, down to the specific page. The lower image shows the number highlighted on the web page.

2.4 Stage 4 – Review

This stage is to carry out a thorough audit to ensure remediation has been completed successfully (and no new content has been added). Against every allocated change, confirmation of the change (date actioned / by whom) would be beneficial to report. Also against each page of content, it is useful to record the confirmation of it being checked and remediated, where appropriate.

2.5 Stage 5 – Update content standards

In publishing going forward, content author / editors need to be aware of the regulatory change and ensure that no new content is published contained prohibited numbers. For Sitemorse clients, this is a simple update to the rules setup, where clients have integration to publishing (each and every page assessed as part of the publishing workflow – independently by Sitemorse but within the CMS).