THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 27, 1995 TAG: 9503250250
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 08 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, BUSINESS WEEKLY
LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
Waste four seconds 850 million times, and you've lost more than 39,000 days.
That's longer than all but a few centurions among us will be alive.
But to Bell Atlantic Corp., it's a meaningful number. And it's why on April 4, if you call the company for directory assistance from your home or office in Hampton Roads, you'll notice some changes.
Back to the numbers:
Four seconds is the average time we spend saying things like ``uhh'' or ``ahh'' or nothing at all as our minds drift when we call a Bell Atlantic operator to get a phone number.
850 million is the number of directory-assistance calls the phone company handles each year in Virginia and the rest of its mid-Atlantic territory.
39,000 days is about what all those wasted bits of time add up to. That's about 20 operators a year working full time.
To cut the waste, Bell Atlantic plans these steps:
When you call directory assistance, after hearing James Earl Jones' throaty ``Welcome to Bell Atlantic,'' you won't immediately get an operator any longer. Instead, another recorded voice will ask you for the city that you're calling.
When you answer ``Chesapeake'' or ``Williamsburg,'' for example, you'll get another voice asking you for the actual listing.
Then a live operator will get on the line and give you the number that he or she has already looked up after hearing your voice responses, minus those time-consuming pauses and extraneous grunts.
``The operator won't have to listen to all the breathing spaces and the ``hmms'' and ``umms'' any longer, said Shirley Risoldi, a Bell Atlantic spokeswoman.
Risoldi said callers can circumvent the process and reach the operator at any time by pressing ``0'' on a Touch-Tone phone or pressing and releasing the receiver button on a rotary phone.
Through this and many other efficiencies, Bell Atlantic hopes to cut 5,600 jobs by mid-1997. The planned job reductions were announced in August 1994. by CNB