New phone service options get ready to come on line.

Businesses eye phone options as way to hike productivity

Spurred by opportunities for additional user fees, phone companies that already offer a bundle of customer-friendly calling options are rolling out even more frills aimed at users of home and business phone services.

Next month, GTE California plans to introduce new options to customers of its business line CentraNet service. Subscribers will be able to identify certain incoming calls from the sound of different rings, block undesired calls, and choose when to be interrupted by pre-designated priority calls.

The service is being offered to small to medium-sized businesses. Other phone carriers, such as Pacific Bell, already offer the service.

Thousand Oaks-based GTE plans to add these features to its already widely used CentraNet basic voice mail, call waiting and call forwarding services. The basic services, which have become virtually universal among phone carriers, are also available to GTE's residential customers. Some 95 percent of the carrier's 3.2 million customers reside in Southern California.

After initially being coolly received by some customers, calling options such as voice mail, call screening and automatic call return are apparently winning over an increasing number of phone company subscribers. At first, many users were skeptical about paying extra for voice messaging services that were considered complicated, frustrating and even rude.

Complaints ranged from frustration with lengthy, complicated voice menus to concerns about alienating callers who had to waste time listening to impersonal recorded voices.

Services catch on

With improvements in applying the technology, telephone companies are now finding interactive voice options so widely accepted that users, particularly businesses, have come to demand more from the existing services, as well as demanding new services.

"Companies are looking more for services that can increase their business' productivity. These devices can, indeed, be productive if they're used correctly," said Sandy Hale, a spokeswoman for Pacific Bell Information Services in San Ramon, Calif.

Next year Pacific Bell Information Services, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based Pacific Bell, plans to introduce a new messaging feature called 1Mail. That system is designed to let users who are away from their offices check documents in their fax machines, voice mail or e-mail, either from a telephone or from a personal computer.

Existing conventional technology allows either a telephone or computer to perform only some of these functions at any one time.

The company also plans to unveil a fax mail service designed to let callers instruct their voice mail to reroute incoming faxes from their offices to a fax machine or personal computer at another location, such as a hotel or distant meeting site.

While specific revenue figures for various services were not available, voice mail messaging services have proved to be a cash cow for phone companies, industry sources said.

"If phone companies weren't expecting to increase their revenues through these services, they wouldn't be offering them," said Barry Ross, executive vice president of the California Telephone Association, a trade group based in Sacramento.

According to Opus Research, a San Francisco-based telemedia research firm, the projected number of voice mail calls placed in the United States in 1994 should jump by some 20 percent to 1.1 billion calls, up from 867 million in 1993.

Total revenues generated from voice mail calls should increase to a projected $380 million in 1994, up from a reported $250 million in 1993, according to Opus.

Industry observers attributed the continual increases to stepped-up promotion by carriers. But voice messaging has also rapidly become a platform for phone companies to introduce a range of new business and entertainment services, some of which are already available.

New options

Phone companies are also experimenting with additional "text-to-speech" services, such as talking newspapers and yellow pages, which are currently being used around the country.

And other options, such as one available in New York that enables callers to leave voice messages with directory assistance operators for the owner of an unlisted phone number, have yet to receive California regulatory approval.

"The good news for phone companies is that, when voice mail is installed, there's a considerable increase noted in the number of completed calls," said Opus consultant Daniel N. Miller.

That has helped drive down the cost to phone companies of delivering these services by as much as 50 percent since 1991. The reductions have been due to economies derived from increases in calling volume and new, more-efficient technologies, including more powerful personal computers, to handle demand, Miller said.

The cost to consumers has also dropped by more than 50 percent since phone companies began offering customers basic voice mail services over public network telephone lines.

Typically, monthly service fees range between $5 and $15, after a one-time installation fee. Smaller phone companies and consulting firms also offer custom voice mail services that are installed and operated from within a client business' office network.

The California Public Utilities Commission, which has the authority to approve most phone company services, also stipulates that the cost of custom calling options to consumers be fair and reasonable. The regulatory agency also tries to assure that the services don't violate privacy rights. But it has done little to satisfy users who complain about the services' complexities.

Despite their growing popularity and perhaps because of it, calling options still bewilder some phone company customers. "Phones can become very complicated. They require a lot of extra work, even as they bring a lot of convenience," said Lisa Freeman, director of public relations for CareAmerica Health Plans, a Woodland Hills-based health maintenance organization.

One of Freeman's concerns: while consumers are inundated with new features, they aren't always properly trained by providers to use them correctly or effectively.

Rick Friedman, office administrator for Anderson McPharlin & Connors, a Los Angeles law firm, said he welcomes the innovation. "I'm for it, if it makes our attorneys more productive and saves our clients time," Friedman said.

Friedman said his 46-attorney office depends on voice mail and finds call blocking an indispensable part of doing business.

As to critics' charges that the calling options are getting increasingly complex, people eventually adapt to the complexities, Friedman said.