PacBell to Put Phone Bills on PC Diskettes

Corporate telephone customers, some who struggle with monthly phone bills that typically run 600 to 1,200 pages, may get some relief next month from Pacific Bell.

The phone company plans to start offering a billing system that will allow companies to receive listings of their monthly charges on personal computer diskettes. The bills, which come complete with special software, can simply be inserted into personal computers, which then sort, group and analyze the charges according to the customer’s needs.

The target audience for the service, which will work with IBM personal computers and compatible models, are large companies making 300,000 or more toll calls per month and attorney’s offices, ad agencies and other professional firms that apportion telephone charges on a case or project basis.

“I have been asking for this for four years,” said Paul Chapman, manager of telecommunications at Trans World Airlines’ Western regional headquarters at Los Angeles International Airport.

Chapman said that the airlines’ 1,500-worker complex at LAX is served by more than 300 telephone lines and that the phone bill that he has been sorting and analyzing by hand for years runs about 600 pages per month. “Now, I can do this all on my PC spreadsheet program and be done with it in a fraction of the time,” he said.

Pacific Bell’s computerized bill, which will cost $15 per month plus a $100 one-time charge, is the latest in a handful of similar products that phone companies across the nation have recently begun to offer their business customers, many of whom are reeling from the costs and chaos generated by the deluge of new telecommunications services, including computer networks and fax machines.

“As telecommunications, computer networks and the like become more important to businesses, executives increasingly need to understand how these services are being used in their businesses--by whom, for how long and between what locations,” said Stephen Sazagari, a telecommunications analyst at Dataquest, a San Jose market research firm. The information, he said, can help businesses select not only the proper phone services to install but the most cost effective.

Phone companies say their new computerized bills satisfy this “need to know” and give them a competitive advantage serving large business customers, traditionally the most valued by utilities because of their volume usage and lower per-capita maintenance requirements.

A Pacific Bell spokesman admitted the company’s primary motivation in offering the new service--after studying its potential for nearly four years--is its concern that its monopoly market will be opened up to competitors in coming years, competitors who could lure away valued corporate business.

“We have customers who swear they would leave us is we ever pulled Fonview,” said Robin Lloyd, the manager of U.S. Sprint’s computerized billing system.

However, some analysts remain largely unconvinced that the bill-on-a-diskette represents much of an improvement over paper bills, especially when compared to what businesses could have.

The real breakthrough service that big businesses need, said Douglas Gold, director of communications research at International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass., is on-line, instantaneous monitoring of telephone usage.

Allowing businesses to tap into phone companies’ computers to retrieve daily, or even hourly, phone usage summaries, he argues, could provide vast quantities of information so quickly that businesses could adjust their strategies and marketing programs.

“These boutique billing options they have now are fine, but we’re going to have to wait for a few more years for the more valuable billing services, such as instantaneous, minute-by-minute accounting of network usage,” Gold says.