Directory Assistance? Sorry, Wrong Number -- Cut Off From Local Data, At&T Is Clueless

WASHINGTON - The phone rang in the office of a dentist here and at the other end was a very angry woman, calling long distance. Why, she demanded, wasn't President Clinton answering her letters about her son's troubles in the Army?

Receptionist Elizabeth Jaramillo, who answered the call, knew immediately what had happened: Once again, a directory-assistance operator had given out the number for the wrong White House. The caller wanted the place where the president lives; she got the office of Jaramillo's employer, Dr. Susan Whitehouse.

"It happens all the time," said Jaramillo. "Lately I've noticed it's getting worse."

Across the country, long-distance directory assistance is handing out bum information with increasing frequency, telephone-industry executives concede. Callers are being told cities don't exist, area codes can't be searched or famous landmarks aren't listed. And for this they're charged nearly a buck each time.

If you thought competition in the telephone business was supposed to improve services such as directory assistance, you thought wrong. The problem: As local phone companies begin to compete against long-distance carriers and each other, many are refusing to share updated lists of customers' phone numbers.

So companies such as AT&T are scrambling to assemble their own lists of phone numbers, using whatever sources they can find - credit-card data, motor-vehicle records, electronic scans of Bell companies' telephone books. Garbage in, garbage out, goes the old computer mantra. The resulting databases often are larded with errors, which the operators unknowingly pass to callers.

Dial the number AT&T gives you when you ask for City Hall in New York City and chances are good that Andrew Shabasson, manager of the City Hall Billiard Club across the street, will pick up the phone.

"On my shift I get at least 15 to 20 wrong numbers a day," said Shabasson one recent day, as he directed customers to a table. "I get marriage-license calls, death-certificate calls, questions about housing permits."

Ask for the Baltimore City Police Department, and an AT&T operator may give you the number for University of Baltimore Campus Police. The Los Angeles Coliseum has no number, according to another operator. In Des Moines, a county judge answers when you thought you were calling the U.S. attorney's office there.

"It's a huge problem for information professionals and new small businesses," said Tom Sterner, a private investigator with Decision Strategies/Fairfax International LLC here, who said his company's number didn't show up on AT&T's listings until 18 months after it moved from New York.

It used to be that when somebody dialed, say, 612-555-1212, the long-distance company always sent the call directly to operators at the local phone company in Minneapolis, who would provide the requested listing. The local phone company collected a fee from the long-distance company for that help.

But that was back when local and long-distance phone companies weren't getting into each other's business. In 1995 AT&T decided to handle its own listings: By hiring non-union operators from regional service centers - at half the wages of unionized Bell operators - the company figured it could do the job more cheaply and not give any business to its soon-to-be rivals, the regional Bells.

Moreover, the Bells had begun putting their own audible "logos" on their directory calls, such as when James Earl Jones' voice says "Welcome to Bell Atlantic" in the Washington area. "You really don't want your competitor using your time and money to brand their service" with your own customers, said AT&T spokeswoman Pat Mallon.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires local phone companies to make listings available to every company, but the law says nothing about how or at what specific price.

Bell Atlantic says it complies with the law by providing direct links to its own operators, at a fee, same as always. "We're providing an up-to-date database," said spokesman Ells Edwards. "AT&T made a purely competitive decision. They did not want a company they consider a major competitor providing directory assistance to them."

But what companies such as AT&T want are raw data from the local companies' computers, at a reasonable price. It would be fed into the new directory services computers for use by their operators.

"Bell Atlantic is the worst," said Dan Evanoff, chief executive of Excell Agent Services LLC, a fast-growing Phoenix operator-services company that AT&T hired to handle more than half of its directory requests. "We constantly call, write and ask for a change in their policy. We've sent certified letters to their CEO. They didn't even respond."

Mike Hollobow, senior product manager for directory assistance for Ameritech, which is experimenting with its own nationwide directory service makes a similar complaint: "They want us to tap into their computers and pull names off one name at a time" at a fee each time. "We're not interested. We need all of their listings."

So AT&T, Ameritech and others are trying to assemble their own lists of phone numbers and are finding out how hard it is. Excell, which has received the brunt of the criticism for wrong AT&T numbers, scours 300 different sources for listings, according to Evanoff.

In these databases, "non-published" numbers sometimes get published. And operators looking for a general phone number for a large business often end up giving out some far-flung office extension or fax number.

Ask for the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, for example, and AT&T gives you the listing for the group sales office, which few people need.

The White House has missed more than a few calls. Until a few months ago, Ameritech's database refused to display the correct number unless operators typed in the word "The" before White House. And even then, if operators aren't careful, they'll give out the number for dentist Susan Whitehouse, the Whitehouse Cleaners or the clothing outlet called The White House in Union Station.

AT&T customers trying to get numbers for the Washington, D.C., region fare better than Ameritech customers because AT&T farms out that business not to Excell but to CFW Communications, a Waynesboro, Va., local phone company that uses the high-priced system of sending callers to Bell Atlantic.

Elsewhere, AT&T is fighting to improve its image. Excell operators are being trained to handle specific geographic regions and understand dialects.

This week, AT&T plans to unveil an updated national directory service in Seattle, Denver and other cities in which people can dial "00" to find phone numbers in any area code. The price will be the same as today's service, 95 cents for two listings.

AT&T also hopes to mitigate one of consumers' biggest gripes: that operators often are unable to find a number unless the caller knows the exact town where it's located. Operators "will stay with you for as long as it takes to find what you're looking for," said one industry executive.

Other long-distance carriers have been spooked by AT&T's troubles. MCI Communications and Sprint still hook customers directly to the Bells, though MCI gradually is using its own operators wherever it can get raw listings data from a Bell company.

The Federal Communications Commission, which implements the 1996 law and regulates the phone companies' interstate business, has stayed out of the fight. "We would hope the marketplace would hash this out and find new solutions," said one commission official.

In the end, competition may force companies to share data. Bell companies Ameritech, BellSouth and US West all recently began offering nationwide directory services.

By no coincidence, those three also are the most cooperative among the Bells when it comes to offering data - even to Excell.