for teleservices and vanity numbers remains strong.
She cites a Wall Street Journal article
(“With Customer Service, Real Person
Trumps Text,” April 25) that found 90
percent of people say they still want their
inquiries handled by live representatives
over the telephone as opposed to online
communication avenues.
“Online communication does not
always provide as much information, and
can’t correct problems the way a live two-
way phone conversation can,” Noonan
says. “This is good news for businesses
that use a phone number in their adver-
tising campaigns as a consumer response
and lead-generation tool. With consumer
reliance on toll-free numbers to contact
businesses, and the fact that consumers
prefer to have live communication with
the companies they do business with,
toll-free vanity 800 numbers will remain
key components in advertising cam-
paigns to reach consumers and generate
response.”
Christy Brugger, vice president of sales
and marketing for Custom TollFree, a tel-
eservices company in Mill Creek, Wash.,
says the Internet can’t replace the value
of a real person in building a relationship
with clients and loyalty to a brand, and
that there’s still no better way to track re-
More and more companies are
designing solutions for payments to be
made remotely using a cell phone or
contactless card, according to Eureka
Payments LLC.
sponse to individual campaigns than with
toll-free numbers.
“Using unique URLs that incorporate
superfluous forward slashes, hyphens and
random numbers throws off many con-
sumers and technologically savvy users
bypass all that and head straight for the
homepage, which makes accurate track-
ing impossible,” Brugger says. “And these
types of URLs are tough to remember or
write down accurately, so this works pri-
marily in print advertisements but not as
well on TV and certainly not on radio or
billboard advertisements.”
To simplify things for prospective cus-
tomers, Scott Richards, CEO of Dial 800
