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AT&T Receives Award for Toll-Free Services Strategy

Posted on: Tuesday, 28 October 2003, 06:00 CST

BEDMINSTER, N.J., Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- AT&T today announced it received the 2003 Frost & Sullivan Product Line Strategy Award for its U.S. toll-free services.

"AT&T has demonstrated its ability to remain a market leader in the wake of toll-free market maturation, increasing competition, and growing operational uncertainty among telecommunications services providers," Frost & Sullivan noted. "It not only offers a robust toll-free product portfolio, but also responds effectively to the changing market needs/demands."

The Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Line Strategy is presented to the company that has demonstrated the most insight into customer needs and product demands, optimizing its product line by leveraging products with the various price, performance, and feature points required by the market.

AT&T Toll-Free Services and AT&T Toll-Free Advanced Features can help businesses extend their reach to new or targeted audiences, enhance their customer service, and control or lower their marketing expenses. A toll-free number can enable a business to generate revenues by providing easy access and more personal interaction with potential and current customers.

Toll-Free solutions are based on the individual needs of a business, and thereby can reduce operations costs by optimizing agent and system workloads.

"We have always been an innovator in toll-free service capabilities," said Linda Lunga, director, AT&T enterprise voice services. "We will continue to apply our networking expertise to help toll-free service customers use our basic or advanced offers to improve their productivity, management of expenses, and customer relationships."

TALX Corporation, a St. Louis-based business process outsourcer for the payroll and human resources markets, views AT&T Toll-Free Services as mission-critical. The company uses AT&T Toll-Free Advanced Features like AT&T Transfer Connect(SM) to send a call from one call center to another without the expense of an additional line, and Network Queuing to place callers on hold until a service representative is available to take the call.

"Corporate telecommunications is a strategic need of our business," said TALX Chief Technologist Bryan Garcia. "Because TALX depends so heavily on its phone network, AT&T's network reliability reflects positively on how clients perceive TALX. We know we can count on AT&T to do things right."

AT&T introduced the first toll-free 800 service more than 35 years ago as a way for large businesses to pay for direct-dialed calls from major customers and suppliers. The industry has grown and expanded to now include a total of four "area codes" -- 800, 888, 877 and 866. Since the start, AT&T has led the industry in toll-free services, developing advanced features to meet the complex requirements of customers migrating to new technologies, such as speech recognition in call centers, e-commerce and mass advertising campaigns.

"AT&T is likely to remain a market leader in toll-free product line development over the next several years. AT&T's robust product portfolio is directly responsible for the company's market leadership position within the medium and large business toll-free services market," said Frost & Sullivan analyst Imran Khan. "Both medium and large businesses not only exhibit greater demand for advanced features, but also often require greater control over the service, and AT&T offers them the best of both worlds."

AT&T Toll-Free Services work with both regular phone lines and dedicated access lines. The services are integrated with AT&T's major product portfolios for businesses and government agencies, including AT&T Virtual Telecommunications Network Service and the AT&T Business Network for large companies, and AT&T All In One(SM) for small-and medium-sized businesses. AT&T Toll-Free Services offer a robust suite of advanced features, including announcement services, and routing and redirection services-all customizable through many individualized options.

More information on AT&T Toll-Free services is available at http://www.att.com/tollfree.

About AT&T

AT&T (http://www.att.com/) is among the premier voice and data communications companies in the world, serving businesses, consumers, and government. The company runs one of the most sophisticated communications networks in the United States, backed by the research and development capabilities of AT&T Labs. A leading supplier of data, Internet and managed services for the public and private sectors, AT&T offers outsourcing and consulting to large businesses and government. The company is a market leader in local, long distance and Internet services, as well as transaction-based services like prepaid cards, collect calling and directory assistance. With approximately $37 billion of revenue, AT&T has about 40 million residential customers and 4 million business customers, who depend on AT&T for high-quality communications. AT&T has garnered several awards for outstanding performance and customer service.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/19991018/ATT )