OCR Text |
Show Ma Bell offers calling card service SALT LAKE CITY -Introduction of Calling Card Service (CCS), which began in Utah in July, is now virtually complete, according to Glen Bloxham, a staff manager in operator-services operator-services for Mountain Bell. t "Customers with Calling Cards (credit r cards) can now place . long-distance calls from b Touch-Tone phones f without the aid of an i operator," Bloxham said, s "And any Mountain Bell customer, residence or business, can order a Calling Card free of charge by phoning his or her Residence Service Center or Business Service Center." Calling Cards are designed tor times when customers wish to bill calls to a number other than the one they are calling Irom. Good examples are calls placed from pay phones or motel-hotel rooms, and personal calls placed from a place of em-plovmcnt. em-plovmcnt. To use CCS on Touch- Tone phones, customers punch zero plus the number being called, then wait to hear a tone i or a tone plus a recorded message on pay phones). They then punch in their personal Calling Card number, and the calls go through without any operator assistance. Using CCS makes long-distance calling more convenient, faster and less expensive than third-number calls (calls charged to another number! or collect calls." Bloxham said. He said more customers are using Calling Cards since the CCS conversion. For example, a typical day's tracking during the early stages of the conversion showed that 37 percent of the operator station calls (collect, third number-billed number-billed and Calling Card) were of the Calling Card variety. By the first day of September, that percentage had jumped to 43. Another example of the success of the Utah conversion was the vast increase of CCS calls placed during the summer sum-mer without operator assistance. During the first day of September, with the conversion virtually complete, 13.380 Calling Card calls were reared by the customers without operator assistance. On July 7, shortly alter the conversion con-version began, only 3,824 Calling Card Calls were placed by customers without assistance. "We feel that dramatic increase means the education proceess that went along with the conversion was very successful," Bloxham says. That process included in-cluded news releases, bill inserts and operator messages given to customers who were still placing Calling Card calls through the operator." I'.loxham said Calling Card station-to-station calls can save customers 74 cents on intrastate calls and 50 cents on most interstate calls when the customers punch in the number they are trying to reach. |