The National Audit Office has today published a report about the new directory enquiry services (DQ).

There’s been some interested comments about this already in the press, and although I don’t agree with most of them I see no need to go over old ground. So I’m going to pick on something that caught my eye as I snoozed in bed this morning.

On BBC Breakfast was a guy from 118tracker.com. This is a very good website and lists details of all the DQ providers together with rates and services they offer.

I wasn’t so impressed with his comments. His suggestion was that the public was largely uniformed about the extended DQ services that are available. He then went on to say that this was OFCOM’s fault.

If you’ve read my posts in the past you may have realised I’m not a fan of OFCOM. I don’t believe they work hard enough to enforce the legislation that’s in place. However, I’m happy to defend OFCOM on this point. They’re not a marketing organisation and it’s not up to them to educate consumers as to the services available. The only responsibility OFCOM have is to ensure that consumers are aware that they have a choice of suppliers. I think they did this very well.

Marketing
At the end of the day, I don’t think the failure to take up these services is due to a lack of advertising. People are not interested in them and have therefore ignored the advertising. I don’t think the public is prepared to pay a few pence to get cinema listings when they’re free in the local paper or on the ‘net.

The important thing about a free market is that you…market. You’re not forced to offer any particular service. Ensure that there is a market for what you’re offering, ensure that people are prepared to pay for it.

Public perception
In true style of the 3G licence fiasco, enormous amounts of money were being thrown around after 118 numbers were allocated by the big boys trying to get the best numbers. This was followed by several large-scale advertising campaigns, one was so successful that still to this day people shout “Got your number!” at me when I’m out running.

This gave the public an inflated perception of what liberalisation of the market was going to offer. They didn’t exactly know what was going to be different - they just knew it was going to be great. This gave way to dissapointment when things weren’t much different to what they used to be.

As a consequence everybody is still saying that opening the DQ market was a failure. Some say it’s more expensive. Some say the services are no better. Some say the quality is worse. But the truth is:

Some DQ providers are cheaper than 192, and some are more expense.
Some DQ providers offer extended services, and some don’t.
Quality is the only thing we can’t measure because data was never collected about 192. However, many DQ providers offer over a 90% success rate.

All call centre staff will know that the 10% of numbers not found will be more to do with GIGO than anything else.

You pays your money, you takes your choice. A free market at it’s best.

Regards,
DB

I just want to have one quick dig at OFCOM: They elected to disallow use of 118192 because it was seen as the best number and be an unfair advantage.
At which point did someone think this was a better number than 118118?