1-800 CALL ME CRAZY
Vanity numbers and phone systems that make you spell first or last names should become extinct for businesses that expect people to dial from a cell phone.
RIM (Blackberry) has a 41% market share of smart phones and the overall smart phone market is 15.2% of all cell-phone users. Blackberry’s are great phones (I use one personally), however one thing Blackberries don’t do is show you the alpha keypad translation like a land-line phone.
Go ahead, try calling a company phone system and typing in the name Swatorski, Zlinksy, or even Jones on your first try from a Blackberry. Call 422-Blue to reach the St. Louis Blues or 1888-GET CHARTER… you get it. Now try it while driving – whoops, watch out.
Vanity numbers promise improved sales and brand recognition because a consumer can commit to memory and dial later – that still makes sense for consumers. However, if your target audience is comprised of business people than give it up. Companies should be striving to make it easier to buy or service their customers, but, now they are upsetting 41% of business users with a bad brand touch, or worse, no touch at all (I still haven’t figured out how to dial charter!).
I have heard these same comments from other Blackberry users. But, one of the nice features of BlackBerry’s is that you can dial letters, and the BlackBerry will figure out the corresponding number. For example, to dial 1-800-NEW-CARS, do the following on your BlackBerry:
1. From the Home screen or the Phone application, dial 1-800.
As you type the first number, the Phone application opens (if it isn’t open already) and displays the numbers you dialed.
2. Press and hold the ALT key and then dial (press) NEW-CARS.
You can see the letters appearing on-screen as you type.
Other devices may operate differently, however there is a way for them to dial vanity 800 number.
So, there is a really easy way to get around this. And, the new BlackBerry Storm, which looks like an iPhone, has the letters on the number pad. So, it’s not an issue.
I think suggesting that companies who have built their brand on their phone numbers, like 1-800-FLOWERS, Best Buy with 1-800-BEST-BUY, and UPS with 1-800-PICK-UPS, to use numeric numbers (which are impossible to remember by the way), is unrealistic.