The United Kingdom had its busiest online buying day of the year (December 8th) as millions of people exchanged the high street for the computer. An incredible £320 million was forecast to be spent online throughout the day.

The peak shopping hour being between 1pm-2pm as workers log-on during their lunch breaks to search for their Christmas gifts and £28 million looks possible to have been spent during this time alone. This is twice the amount spent during the peak hour (midday) on Monday 11th December 2006.

Here are 5 ways that businesses can help cope with the huge demand using their non-geographic telephone numbers (0845, 0800, 03 numbers etc):

1.         Online call statistics package work in tandem with non-geographic telephone numbers and allow businesses to view the total number of calls received, busy periods and calls that where missed etc. to their phone numbers. Businesses can then use this information to help businesses plan their staffing effectively during busy times / days of the week.

2.         Call queuing systems are frequently associated with call centres and very large corporations. However, these days many SME’s are using call queuing with their non-geographic telephone numbers in order to take more calls, deal with their enquirers more efficiently and increase their sales. Large and little businesses can line up to 100 callers at any particular time. Call queuing functions are also used as a chance to play customers advertising messages.

3.         - Voicemail to email functions  let businesses receive recordings as an audio file to an email account of their choice. This would make sure that any un collected calls during busy times would get dealt with by the correct person, straight away.

4.         Call divert is an excepted feature which is used with non-geographic numbers and allows companies to identify different landline/mobile numbers that enquirers are pointed to in the unfortunate occurrence of an emergency / landline failure. Businesses can choose the amount of phone rings before forwarding the call to another number – which might be a home/mobile number or call answering service out of hours etc.

5.         Call management systems are all controlled online with any changes implemented straight away – giving companies flexibility over their phone systems to increase the amount of sales and enquiries.

As this information displays, companies can simply take advantage of the busiest online shopping days of the year and it doesn’t have to cost them huge amounts to do so – just a smart telephone number and lots of extra people to help count the proceeds!