Hi everyone! Zarte here! Bear with me a moment, would you? I’m just trying to memorise my bumper book of UK area codes!
OK... and I’m with you. Why am I trying to learn UK dialling codes? Well first of all, because I’m a bit weird and quite enjoy learning obscure lists, but perhaps more importantly because it really is an important thing that more people should be doing in our opinion. Not only learning their local area codes, but also how to display them properly. Let me run you a few reasons why this is the case.
- Probably the most important of all the reasons is that plenty of people are completely aware how different area codes should be formatted, and will know what the code is for different areas. If you misformat your telephone number on your correspondence, it reflects really badly on your professionalism and attention to detail. Take our dialling code for instance. The majority of people know that our area code is simply “023”, however so many people are convinced that an area code MUST be 5 digits, that we see “02392” and “02393” all over the place. I realise that we may have a slightly strengthened perspective on this as a company who handles telecoms, however it’s not just us that is infuriated by poor number formatting, so get yours wrong at your peril. Furthermore, even if someone isn’t as anally retentive about the matter as we are, they still may view your number as not being local if the formatting doesn’t match up with their expectation of how the local number should be laid out. Image and location are both important factors, so don’t let apathy cause your problems.
- Knowing your area code could save you a little bit of time. It might not seem like a lot, however if you’re dialling a local number from a local number, then you need only put the digits after the area code in for the call to connect. This may not seem awfully important, but to a business who consistently call other local business and residential customers, being able to cut down the number of digits that need punching in is a blessing. Put what comes after 023 in and you’ll be saving yourself time immediately. Put what comes after 02392 in, and you’ll simply find yourself wondering where you’ve gone wrong, and slowing yourself down. Additionally, if you could rely on everyone knowing local area codes, it’d be much simpler when dictating a phone number to simply say “Portsmouth 9298 8855” or “Milton Keynes 222 111”.
- Leading on from the last point, phone numbers generally become much easier to remember when you only have to remember a portion of them. If you know where the people you want to call are, and know your area codes, then a memorable number need only be 6 to 8 digits instead of 11. A far more manageable portion.
- A correctly formatted telephone number is vastly more likely to be found successfully when hunted for by a search engine. If you have a business that someone would realistically search for with a local parameter, such as “taxis 023”, then having an incorrectly formatted telephone number will once more leave you at risk of being outshone by companies who can perfectly match that search with their correct layout.
These are, as usual with our list articles, not an exhaustive list of important reasons to get to know your (and other) dialling codes, but are a few good points that we do think are important to get to grips with.
Should you wish to learn more about dialling codes, their importance, or anything else pertaining to telecoms, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us as always, either by telephone, email, or through our contact form on the contact page. We love hearing from you, and will quite gladly add to any of our posts (with an attribution if appropriate) if you make a good, valuable point that we hadn’t thought of ourselves.
Until next time,
Zarte