0845 numbers are known as a ‘local rate’ numbers. Thiey are typically used where your company wishes to allow callers to contact you at a local call rate from anywhere in the UK. They provides the customer with a cheaper way of calling you, even though they may be calling from another region.
0845 numbers are often also used for marketing and fund raising campaigns as a temporary number so that the main telephone service does not become swamped with calls. This is a sensible precaution as a smaller company can usually only answer one or two calls at a time and a short term campaign will hopefully generate a high volume of calls arriving all at once.
Charges
With an 0845 Local Rate number, your customers pay a standard ‘local rate’ charge to call you from anywhere in the UK; this equates to 3.5p per minute.
ENET5 makes a small charge of £9.95 for the supply of 0845 numbers.
How it works
You are provided with your own dedicated 0845 number and a 'management number'. All you need to do is chose a destination number to which to route calls and call the management number to set your chosen destination number. You are then ready to publish your new number as you wish.
There is no charge for changing the destination number which is immediate and as can be done as frequently as you require.
The destination telephone number can be any geographic telephone number such as your home (perhaps a second business number), office telephone or answering service. An attractive combination is the 0845 number linked to an ENET5 VoIP number; our VoIP service provides you with automatic and unlimited voicemail if you are not able to take the call.
Please note that 0845 numbers cannot be called using the inclusive minutes on a mobile phone and can incur a premium charge set by the operator. This is also true of some non-BT telephone companies. Also some countries do not allow calls to UK 0845 numbers which is why you sometimes see the international version of a geographic number shown for incoming international calls such as ‘+44 207 1234 4321’.