Foreign Perspectives

As part of the business of being customer friendly we’ve local rate or tollfree numbers for a few countries which can sometimes result in very confusing phone calls from the sheer number of different phone numbers that we have.

For instance, now and again we get a little run of phone calls for some garden centre in America because we’ve a tollfree number that’s similar to theirs. So, any time that they run a promotion we’re sure to know about it just as soon as it hits the streets.

We’ve also quite a nice local rate number for the UK which gets a fair number of duff calls too now and again. For reasons which escape me, these particular callers take a bit of convincing that really we’re not who they want to speak to.

And then there’s the French who seem to assume that all phone numbers are also the fax number and vice versa so we get quite a raft of faxes on our normal phone number and a surprising number of people calling on the fax number. What they seem completely unable to grasp is that in fact our real fax number is actually a UK number that forwards the “faxes” to our e-mail.