We hate Misdials, Protect Yourself
Misdials are an important consideration
Some numbers have a significant number of misdialed numbers.
There have been very successful businesses made out of securing a big companies phone number that is prone to fat fingering, typos and transposing phone numbers.
This is especially true of the newer toll free area code 877 which may be confused for the 800 version. This is not the case with the 888 vanity numbers since there are so many companies using 888 now that it is almost as popular as the 800#’s. It’s important to stress in your marketing that 877 is Toll Free since it looks like any other new area code and many people don’t realize that it’s toll free. You must anticipate a 10% loss to the 800# if you are using an 877
Another type of misdial is the O.
The O along with the M and N is usually recognized as the 6 key, but much to the dismay of 1-800 FLOWERS, they found that a significant number of callers misplaced the zero key as the O. And despite trying to stress it in their advertising, they found they were losing a number of calls. If they were customer service calls, that might not be as critical, but in sales that often results in lost revenues or customers.
This brings up the benefit or the down side of misdials. Because if you don’t consider the misdials your competition might, or if your competition has a powerful vanity number you might be able to pick up leads by getting a misdial of it.
Qs and Zs are also dangerous and should be avoided. Most older telephones still don’t have them on thier keypad. The only way to use a word with a Q or Z is to push it off the end of the word. If the Z is the eighth digit it will be ignored.
