I just called the geographic number advertised here for my local currys, got through to a very nice lady, who said "oh! you've come through to the office, all the phones on the sales floor must be busy, let me take your details, and I'll get someone to call you back"

Sooo....not only did I save money on an 0844whatever number, but Currys are going to spend their money calling me!  

Mind you, how long it would take them to rumble me if I called too often I dont know....not very long maybe...?

There are three separate issues raised here, and with many other similar cases:

1. The quality of service delivered both at stores and at central call centres.

2. The question of whether it is better for telephone enquiries to be dealt with by specialist staff at central call centres or staff at stores.

3. Use of revenue sharing numbers to subsidise the cost of handling telephone calls by payment of an enquiry fee by customers.

Some people would rather talk to someone at the store, rather than a call centre agent. This does however mean that staff at the store must be allocated to dealing with telephone enquiries if a reasonable level of service is to be offered and their other duties are to be fulfilled. One can understand why it may make sense to provide this service through a call centre. This does however demand that call centre staff have the appropriate skills and necessary information to hand.

Most of us think it unacceptable for call centres to use revenue sharing numbers so as to effectively impose a fee on customers for this service. (The benefit of 0845 numbers to provide a “local rate” call to a national call centre has now disappeared for most callers.) Information should be provided so that enquiries can be channelled to the appropriate number, which should either be geographic or 03xx, with perhaps a 0800 option for landline callers.

Unless this forum is to be “saynotocallcentres”, it is this latter point that should be our focus. The use of alternative numbers should be putting pressure on users of revenue sharing numbers to cease charging customers for enquiries.

The efforts of CJ and other store staff to deal with those who object to calling call centres and / or revenue sharing numbers are appreciated, one must however hope that they are also reporting the reasons for calls not being made to call centres up through their management chain.

NGMsGhost wrote on Aug 10^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

My sense of reality was perhaps upset on reading of such an employee  offering to "try their best" to help a customer and even extending such an offer on behalf of colleagues.

I was also expecting that anyone caught trying to help a customer on the telephone would need to offer some explanation to the industrial tribunal as to why they were not "doing the job they were employed to do".

(There is a serious point here, but my comments are made in good humour).