Hedgewizard tip - avoiding 0870 charges

[hedgewizard]

Heads up folks, nobody's trying to sell you anything so read this post through.

Now, pretty much every big company uses a call centre, in some cases simply so that they don't have to deal with you. They charge you for the honour of calling them, by using a dialling prefix such as 0845 or 0870. This helps them to offset the cost of the service, and by and large I don't have a problem with the concept of paying a premium to access a modern, well-run, streamlined system which can help you first time, every time. Trouble is, it isn't usually like that. More often than not you wait listening to recorded announcements for thirty minutes (often at 20p/min) until finally you're put through to a gibbon. In the wrong department.

TalkTalk has been my worst experience of this. They gave me a reasonable calls and broadband service, until the day I did something complicated; I moved house. That was ten months ago now, and they still haven't been able to process my change of address and are threatening to take me to court for non-payment of bills for the service after I'd actually moved. We're now doing everything by post because I refuse to deal with their call centre, ever since a memorable two-hour telephone call which saw me chatting to people in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Delhi and somewhere that refused to identify itself. Mainly I just listened to muzak and a recorded voice telling me that, contrary to all appearances, my call was important to them; it's just that they were experiencing abnormally high call volume that day. As they had been doing on every single day I'd ever had reason to call them. I couldn't call from my TalkTalk line as they'd failed to reconnect me, so I had to call from a landline at (I think) 10p/min, so the call cost me £12. Lovely people.

But there is a way round it. Although you are supplied with an 0870 number or similar, the actual connection is only to a standard landline. If you can find the number of that landline, you're only charged for a standard telephone call. And there is a service called Say No To 0870 that gathers and compiles that information. And it works!

[Millymollymandy]

Is there something like that for France?

Why is it that the people that charge the most and are the worst offenders are the ones supplying you with telephone/internet in the first place. Grrrrrr.

[hedgewizard]

Gosh, dunno! I'd be surprised if not, though!

[glenniedragon]

Thanks for that site hedgie, I've bookmarked it as I'm sure I'll get use of it in the future

Kind thoughts
Deb