A lot of people have asked me what they can do to protect their 800 numbers better, especially given all of the issues of ownership and lost numbers we’ve been seeing lately. Once you put your number in print and in all of your advertising, it’s clearly very difficult, expensive or even impossible to change your number.

That’s one of the main reasons why customers use our service, so that whoever they use for the service can’t claim because of some technicality or even a change in the fine print of their contract after you sign up. You don’t want to find out that the number you’ve been advertising and promoting for years is suddenly no longer yours and you’re stuck at the mercy of a phone company claiming ownership of your toll free number.

You really should use a separate Resporg

First of all, in case you’re not familiar with the toll free terms, Resporg is an abbreviation for “Responsible Organization”, the term for an entity that has access into the 800 database and maintains the customer records for a toll free number.

The real solution, short of becoming your own resporg is to use an independent third party resporg, rather than simply allowing the phone company servicing the number to be the resporg. The company providing the service has a financial incentive to keep you there. So relying on them for your ability to transfer the number is like relying on your kids to guard the cookies that they want to eat.

Read more about a couple 3rd party resporg services to protect your 800 number

We’ve added something new to the Toll Free Search Engine. Effective about noon today we’re adding a new way to see who the responsible organization is for a toll free number. We’ve added a code into the Toll Free Search Engine search results that gives the resporg ID in the html code. You have to use reveal codes to see the source code. But there you’ll see for AT&T Resporgs, for Sprint Resporgs and so on.

The SMS/800 said we aren’t allowed to give out the resporg information to the general public but this is merely the first two unique digits of the resporg ID. And it requires advanced knowledge of our system to get to the general public won’t see it. So we believe this falls within the requirements we were given but it also allows users that need this information a way to get it.

See our Resporg ID list for Resporg names and websites.

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Our goal is to get rid of all our customers. No other phone company wants to get rid of their customers as badly as we do. And no other phone company is as efficient at getting rid of their customers as we are. We even go out of our way to get rid of customers faster than any other phone company, because getting rid of our customers is actually our job. The more customers we can get rid of the better.

Regular phone companies want to get and hold their customer for as long as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they don’t add excessive fees to release their 800 numbers or try to hold you hostage by your 800 number like shared use companies do. Most don’t refuse to release numbers, they just drag their feet as much as possible. And believe me, most phone companies are very efficient at dragging their feet. We’re the only ones crazy enough to try to build a business out of getting rid of our customers. 300 more words for anyone having trouble transferring their 800 number.

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This post is intended to help you with the answers to some common questions people sometimes have filling out Resporg forms. The most common question is who is the current, previous or old resporg/carrier?

We are the old carrier, our official resporg name is Resporg.com and our resporg ID is QZA01. You can also include our fax number (800-FAX-0095) on the form if there’s room, although you don’t send that form to us, but it might save a couple seconds for the people within the phone company who do.

There's more about filling out the resporg change forms.

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I was probably the biggest single user of the Ameritech hotline 800-337-4194 for several years. I had a girl whose job it was for a couple years, just to call spreadsheets full of 800 numbers and then call the Ameritech line for all the numbers that didn’t go through.
The Ameritech resporg line is a great system but the names are very out of date!

A lot of times customers need to transfer their toll free number to a call center so I wanted to explain the process for that more clearly. You can either point the toll free number to a local number at the call center or you can transfer the number to the call center’s carrier and account.
More on Transferring your 800# to your Call Center

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We used to give out the phone company name and trouble referral number for the phone company responsible for every toll free number. But unfortunately lawyers for the SMS made us take that information down, claiming that we aren’t allowed to give the Resporg data out to the general public. So rather than give out Resporg data, I’ve spent quite a bit of time collecting my own data.

We have researched all of the active Resporgs to come up with a more descriptive statement without using the SMS data and where possible their websites. The descriptions we use on the Instant 800 Lookup are listed below with the links to their websites. This should make our system as helpful as possible without giving out any SMS data. Not every phone company is listed, just the ones we have information available for.

See the full list of Resporg Descriptions and Websites

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An abbreviation for “Responsible Organization” which is the term for an organization or entity which has access to the SMS 800 database. There are around 300 resporgs. They would be “registrars” in the domain name terminology. Many phone companies are Resporgs but not all phone companies are Resporgs and not all reporgs are phone companies.

We have a whole section of our site for information on and related to Resporg. See http://www.tollfreenumbers.com/resporg/

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Global Crossing uses a lot of resellers and they have one of the best easiest to use systems to find the reseller for a specific toll free number. Call 1-800-466-4600 and just follow their prompts. Press, 1 followed by toll free number and have a pen ready. They will tell you the phone number of the reseller that they show the number with. The best thing is that the smaller resellers are usually not as worried about giving out any information as the bigger companies.

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This is a list of all of the resporgs, their codes and their name linking to their website if I know it. Sometimes we refer to the resporg IDs and this is helpful to translate it. (more…)

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Toll free numbers are portable and able to be transferred from one company to another. However the speed of processing transfer requests varies more than most customers realize. We help companies get good numbers and then transfer them to whatever company the customer wants. So we treat the transfer process as more of a priority. That’s also why we collected and analyzed this data to show our customers how long it takes to transfer their number over to different phone companies. We hope this information is helpful. (more…)

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The toll free number transfer process wasn’t really set up with speed or efficiency in mind. It’s designed to give carriers time to try to win the customer back, not to transfer numbers as quickly as possible. But unlike other carriers, my goal is not to keep customers but to process the transfer requests as quickly and efficiently as possible. So in order to speed up the process of transferring a toll free number from one carrier to another I have developed a unique system. Carrier’s aren’t required to use it, but if they do it can speed up the transfer process for you.

The standard process is to contact the carrier you’re moving to and get a Resporg change form (sometimes called an LOA) from them. You fill it out and fax it back to the new carrier. They enter the order and forward the fax up their chain of command through their resporg department. The resporg department then forwards it to the releasing carrier’s resporg department who has a couple days to accept and release the number or reject it. They can only reject it for a couple reasons, basically if any of the information is incorrect, illegible or out of date.

The process overall requires the signed information to pass through several layers of bureaucracy especially in larger phone companies. I often find that smaller companies process these much faster as they tend to have fewer layers of bureaucracy. But there are reasons for bureaucracy too and even though I want a number to be transferred as quickly as possible, I don’t want to release it until the appropriate orders are in place for the number, in order to insure that the number isn’t misplaced.

Conclusion

I preapprove most numbers on my resporg and under my direct control. But whether a carrier wishes to use this expedited process is up to them. Many of the ones which we work with the most generally do, but the larger ones are a little too structured to do anything other than their standard process. I will still respond and approve those within 24 hours or receiving them, quicker than any other regular resporg.

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