Big 3 making themselves right at home

AT&T, Qwest Communications and Verizon are all taking initiatives to ingratiate themselves more completely with consumers by offering more help. This help is coming in very different forms, according to announcements made previously and this week, but the goal in each case is to strengthen the ties to the residential market.

Both AT&T and now Qwest are offering consumer portals that enable customers to view and manage the services they receive. In AT&T’s case, the portal is part of the U-verse service but also enables customers to configure and customize their home phone service, use the PC to set up digital video recorder options on its new Whole-Home DVR offering, view and manage billing, set up find-me, follow-me options for the home phone service and more.

In a demonstration this week, Chris Percy, vice president and general manager, Midwest for AT&T, showed how the U-verse Central portal enables any customer to manage call preferences, see and hear voice mail, manage contacts and call history, click to call from the home phone, manage an online address book, and implement find-me, follow-me services that can ring one additional phone or multiple phones when a call comes in.

Qwest announced its qHome Portal Thursday, uniting its Qwest Choice Home voice service and its DSL-based high-speed Internet service through Microsoft’s Windows Live to allow customers to view and managed voicemail, email and call logs from a PC. (For more on Qwest’s qHome Portal, listen to this podcast.)