Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Directory Assistance Delivers The Numbers-

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Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2002 23:44:42 -0500

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Directory Assistance Delivers The Numbers

Wireless DA Service Holds Moneymaking Potential For Operators

By Sue Marek
November 18, 2002

Wireless Week
© 2002, Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Wireless directory assistance, that service that helps subscribers find phone numbers, local directions and event information, always has been a high margin cash cow for operators, but now it's starting to attract more attention as carriers look for innovative ways to enhance their revenue.

According to Kathleen Pierz, vice president and program director for the Kelsey Group, a research company that studies directory assistance, about 90 percent of every call to wireless directory assistance is profit, with that profit split 50/50 between the operator and the wholesale provider. Not a bad margin, considering the wireless operator has to do very little to provide service, short of signing up a wholesale partner. But Pierz says operators are starting to look at wireless DA with a much more critical eye to see what more can be done to accelerate their DA business.

Wholesale directory assistance providers are answering the call by finding ways to enhance their existing services. For example, Metro One Telecommunications, which provides wireless DA for AT&T Wireless, Nextel Communications, Alltel Communications and others, has applied for more than 50 patents for features that will provide more personal directory assistance service. The company announced that it was awarded a patent for its method of providing driving directions that uses business names and other visible landmarks to help travelers orient themselves during their route. In addition, the company received a patent that will provide information such as a person's name, address or phone number in a text-message format.

New services may help entice subscribers to using wireless directory assistance, but only if the service is promoted to the customers. Pierz says that even though wireless directory assistance, in general, provides much better customer service than wireline directory assistance, wireless operators do very little to market or promote the service. According to Pierz, as much as 41 percent of wireless subscribers don't even know they can call directory assistance and those that are aware of the service don't know about all the available features. "Wireless DA has some very advanced features but you don't know about them," Pierz says.

One-way directory assistance firms such as InfoNXX are trying to help carriers market their services is by offering back-end messages. According to Charlie Anderson, vice president of marketing for InfoNXX, some carriers will play a message promoting some aspect of directory assistance during the call set-up time when a customer calls information. When InfoNXX, in conjunction with one carrier, provided a back-end message advertising their movie listing service, the percentage of calls to their movie listing service increased dramatically.

But perhaps the biggest new potential in wireless DA is the possibility of providing a person's wireless phone number to callers looking for contact information. According to Pierz, this controversial feature is available in Europe, where about 95 percent of mobile phone numbers are available in a database. In the United States, however, the feature still draws fire from those concerned about privacy, and many wireline carriers fear they will lose business. Pierz believes that providing directory assistance to wireless phone numbers could be a boon for the industry because it would generate more traffic from calls. "If you beef up the service and provide good DA, more people will call you," Pierz says.

Pierz isn't alone in her opinion. Anderson agrees that providing wireless phone number listings offers a huge growth potential. According to Anderson, InfoNXX has developed a wireless listing product that has built-in privacy protection by allowing the operator to connect the person making the inquiry to a subscriber's wireless phone without giving that person the number. The service also asks the wireless listing owner for permission before providing the connection. Anderson says the service is getting attention from many operators and is currently being tested with one major U.S. operator. "We think there's a lot of momentum behind this," Anderson says.

Another push behind the wireless phone number listing DA, says Anderson, is the growing wireless displacement trend. When a person leaves his wireline phone service in favor of wireless, the listing in the current DA databases disappears, making the customer unreachable through DA. The only way to make them reappear is through wireless number listings.

However, for wireless DA to become a reality and success, all wireless operators will have to cooperate and include their subscribers' phone numbers in the database of listings. Otherwise, the database would be very incomplete and the chances of getting a successful DA call would be slight, at best. "It has to be on a mass scale because if you don't get a high accuracy, they won't call back," Anderson says.

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