0870 number

Dave_Conway wrote: Are we talking about royaly shafting the WP’s here ? A topic Ken and I have discussed a few times before by going direct.

Yes, exactly that, settting up a national linkline number to direct t/p traffic to the relevant agent via postcode/phonecode.

Dave_Conway wrote:IMO it is the ONLY way forward for us and the manfucturers, retailers and insurance co’s.

Agreed, strongly.

Dave_Conway wrote:We get paid more, they save on the management fee 👿 and get a far better service by cutting out the middle-man.

Yes and any price increases over time get passed to *US* not the WP as has been happening in a great many cases!

K.

I’ve emailed Paragon for more information/costings and we’ll see what comes back to us. I’ll post it here or mail the info on.

K.

Okay, I got some responses today on this.

Basically, to do what we want it to do it will cost money, the trick is in the routing of the calls which is the technical bit of it all. I had a long chat with John Presscot (unfortunate name I know) of http://www.call-ids.co.uk this afternoon and they can do all we want as wll as a lot more besides for the future. There seems o be only ahandful of companies that can actually do what we want/need th system to do.

Because of the routing we would not generate revenue from calls since that is eaten up in the routing charges, although it won’t cost us anything either to be fair.

Postcode routing is not advised as it’s far to complex to use for users and, like using the STD codes, is too much hassle for mobiles as well. So the suggestion isto use STD as afirst level routing, with further routing as needed, for mobiles etc.. What that means is that the punter calls in and it asks “is this your home number, if yes key 1, if not key 2”, you can see where this is going can’t you? Mobiles are recognised as such and the system immediately asks for the home STD code. We can then break it up into exchanges etc. after that, the nice hting is that this system is scaleable and can b adapted at any point.

Voices cost money! 🙁

Cost wise they reckon bout £2.5K to set it up, roughly that was a ball-park figure that I asked tem to give. Monthly rental I have no idea on.

But….

What we can get is web-based call reporting to see throughput on the number as well as to individual agents we can also see how long it took to answer the call we can also see the number of calls missed! So the reporting is excellent. It also means that we can produce figures to justify the cost of the system to people almost instantly.

So let’s say we all chip in £100 each over 60 members, that’s £6K up front! Allocate £4K to the initial system, £2K left in DASA’s coffers thanks you very much. Get another £50 or £100 off each agent and the number could be put in every Yellow Pages in the UK in a nice little box, not expensive really when the load is spread across all the agents and it would raise out profile as well as DASA’s.

Food for thought.

K.

Re: Dasa number or otherwise.

I agree, as I and others have said before, smaller areas, with a higher volume are far more profitable than a huge area, running around like blue a*se flies for next to nothing. Those of us in semi-rural ares have to put up with the odd nightmare distant call, it goes with the territory, but as I’ve experimented with larger areas over the last five years and done the math, it don’t pay, in fact with the extra admin, fuel, wear and tear on vehicles etc etc, I don’t need to spell it out I’m sure.

TBH, this thread and notion is the ONLY way forward, not just for us though, we have to make the manufacturers and insurers (bollocks to the wp’s) realise that by working with them and not for them, (big difference) there are huge advantages for both parties:

1/ They get a faster, more personal and efficient back up for the products they sell (ATEOTD sales will always be the dominating factor).

2/ The customer has less people to deal with. (How many times do you get that call from a customer not knowing WTF they’re dealing with ?)

3/ We get paid more for the good service we offer by cutting out the feckin’ ridiculous managament fees (On that I checked the new so called CHW increase in work from nesn earlier, they are taking £10 a call 😯 FFS)

4/ We have the oppurtunity of gaining some decent chargeable work when the extended warranty or guarantee runs out as we will be directly contactable.

I hope this all makes sense, what being Saturday night and all, a couple of beers have passed my lips 😕

Dave 8) bloody hot aint it ?

From BT:

BT Telemarketing Services
INFORMATION FOR CUSTOMERS
GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink
Do you have a number of offices dotted around the country which answer your customers’ calls, rather than a single answering centre? GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink can help you ensure that calls are answered where and when you want them to be answered.
Headlines
• PSTN (Public Switched Telephony Network) calls can be delivered according to their geographic origination
• Mobile calls can be bulk routed or based on the nearest BT interconnect point mapping
• calls can be delivered to whichever destination is designated to cover the given area
• national entities appear ‘local’
• enables you to vary your resources to meet changing calling patterns

Key Marketing Benefits
Creating a local presence
GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink enables you to deliver local calls to a local destination. For example, your business has nation-wide coverage, but because of its overall size, has a number of regional offices. You may offer a specifically regional or localised service; therefore you want to answer calls originating from those designated regions within those same regions; this gives a local ‘feel’ to the service that you offer to your customers.
Calls can be sent to a particular individual, such as a Regional Salesperson. However, you only incur the cost of advertising one national number rather than a whole series of separate regional numbers. For example, a mail order firm has a number of regional warehouses around the country; to minimise the distances that orders have to be physically sent to their purchasers, calls are sent through to the nearest warehouse answering point and distribution centre.
Answering calls anywhere that suits
The local or regional centre does not have to be within the designated region. All calls originating from Scotland could be sent to Edinburgh; those from Wales could be sent to Bristol, along with those from elsewhere in the Southwest.
Cost minimisation
You may find that the costs of providing an answering centre are too high in some locations compared to others. Consequently, calls originating from the more costly location could be delivered to an answering centre elsewhere.
Introducing regional variations
Individual areas (or groups of areas) can be given different treatments; you can therefore trial a new product in one area only, or make a variable regional pricing offer. This can still be achieved by using the one national number, rather than having to set up a new number, with associated costs, for the duration of the campaign.

Useful feature combinations
Used in conjunction with other features, GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink becomes a powerful tool for a company’s resource management around the clock. By using GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink in conjunction with TimeLink, calls can be dealt with at several different answering locations during normal opening hours, then transferred to a single answering point outside of those hours. If this includes Saturday and Sunday, DayLink can be added to the suite. By adding DateLink, Bank Holidays and other special days can be added into the equation.
With the further addition of DistributionLink, calls can be split proportionately between the different answering points, on the basis of different times of the day and week.

Tariffs
See BT Price List for details

Feature Summary
Availability of Advanced Feature by BT Telemarketing Services National Number Group (NNG) and Brand:
Feature Freefone Lo-call Nationalcall Call Optimiser International/Universal Value Call Services: (Premium Rate)
Numbers Groups 0800 / 0808 0845
0870
Adv PSTN 0800 / 00800 090X
GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink A A A A N/A A
A= Available N/A= Not Available

Feature Description
The GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink feature allows you to route calls to specified locations based upon BT defined geographic areas. These BT call routing areas are built upon the fixed geographic location of the originating caller, for PSTN callers this is the BT exchange location, Mobile callers are mapped to the nearest exchange to the mobile interconnect BT DMSU (Digital Main Switching Unit) location. GBR (Geographic Based Routing)/ AreaLink defined UK areas comprises of some basic 722 geographic BT network call originating areas (called Caller Subscriber Geography, CSG’s) which can be grouped together to meet your requirements. Calls from one or more areas can then be routed to a particular office (e.g. the one closest to the caller, or even to a particular person (such as the salesperson responsible for the caller’s region).

Yep, I’ve stayed away from the topic on the list as well as in the main forums here for that very reason as, as soon as it is “public” NESN, ISDAL, Anglo and a few other people are going to start squatting! 😉

To be quite honest we have the power as a group to knock these buggers out the park and we have had for a long time it’s just that no-one has ever bothered to get the trade organised in any way at all and, where they have to any degree, there has been a hidden agenda which was mainly to do with money.

I don’t want or expect money from it persay, I want a future in and for this industry and if we don’t do it no-one else will without ripping us off for “management fees”.

However as soon as we do decide to go public with the idea I’m quite sure that we’ll get a *LOT* of support from the industry as a whole as I think a lot of other people higher up the food chain than we are, are just as sick of the WPs and being held to ransom by them.

K.