Non-Geographic Numbering (NGN) services

NGN services operated by national telecoms carriers allow you, the user, to have access to sophisticated and valuable features normally only available to the largest telecoms network operators.

0800 Numbers (Freephone) are used by companies and organisations looking to get high volumes of calls from new and existing clients. The calling party pays nothing towards the cost of the call and the called party pays for all call costs.  0800 numbers are used by organisations looking to increase sales, they are especially used in very competitive markets where there may be many providers offering a similar product or service. They are also used as customer contact numbers for subsequent calls to the organisation, especially where the organisation is driven by the need to provide good customer service.

0845 Numbers (Local rate or Lo-Call) are generally used by companies and organisations looking to project a 'local' feel to their service; especially popular with national organisations with many local or high-street outlets. The calling party pays for a call generally represented as a standard local call from wherever he is in the UK, irrespective of the location of the called party. This makes it attractive for national organisations to use 0845 numbers to project a local or convenient image. The called party pays a proportion of the total costs.

0870 Numbers (National rate) are generally used by companies and organisations where the calling party places some degree of value in making the call. The calling party pays a national rated call from wherever he is in the UK, irrespective of the location of the called party. The called party pays nothing towards the cost of the call and, where the calls are received in sufficient quantities to justify it, the called party (i.e. you) would receive a share of the call costs (paid monthly).  0870 might be used in a direct-sales campaign where there is a degree of exclusivity of the sales product and is used for existing customers to make service and sales calls as the relationship develops.

Using the public telecoms networks run by the carriers to route calls based on rules set up by you means you can:

» Reduce the load on your private network (WAN). Where your calls are answered at a central location and distributed to the desk at distant locations over the private network these calls increase the load (and therefore cost) of your network. Using the public network, i.e. to route calls based on rules you define based on agent skills, availability, time of day, geographic area the caller dialled from, number dialled and many others you can achieve the same thing at no cost.

» Improve the quality of your customer service. Use NGN to get the calls to the required destination and avoid unnecessary call handling. Use network messaging, queuing, call recording and routing facilities to achieve internal service KPIs.

» Reduce the cost of providing in-house IVR services. Similarly where complex voice handling services are required like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems they are costly to acquire and operate for the private user and it is much more advantageous to use the IVR functionality present in the intelligent networks (IN) operated at telecoms carrier level.

» Use benchmarked, approved and popular system features. Carrier-based IVR systems are generally highly advanced in functionality and are maintained and operated by network engineers 24/7. This means you get a high quality of service and any call handling plans we provide for you are well designed and operated.

» Improve the quality and range of information reporting. Use on-line reporting systems to provide an overall view of call handling measured using comprehensive call criteria. Share the information in a convenient and timely format.

Network-based NGN and IVR services are able to deliver very powerful and compelling propositions with regard to handling your inbound calls. As your organisation increases in size and the way you handle calls becomes more complex, you will probably need to address your inbound call handling policy. Departmental, geographic, demographic, sales volume and time factors begin to dictate how to operate the business and generally this can mean significant expense.

PBX and IT suppliers have a vested interest in pursuing a system-based model where the client uses capital equipment to solve these types of challenge. It is possible and very likely that network-based systems such as those provided by Numatel can answer your needs with an attractively designed and costed solution.