Portal power

One tool in the effort to stem the tide of landline losses is the voice/data portal, a service that gives consumers a chance to manage their landline voice and voicemail service from a PC. AT&T has such a portal on U-verse, Qwest Communications just announced one for its broadband customers, and Verizon will add voicemail management to its broadband portal in the fourth quarter of this year.

“It obviously helps us if we can allow them to access their products from multiple places; it increases their need for those products and reduces our churn,” said Ruth Farley, senior product manager for the Verizon broadband portal. Verizon plans to introduce remote access to voicemail via the portal later this year, enabling customers to view caller ID information and listen to their voicemails from a PC. Verizon also plans to add features such as click-to-dial and find-me/follow-me.

AT&T's U-verse Central portal already has a rich set of features. It enables any customer to manage call preferences, see and hear voicemail, manage online address book contacts and call history, click to call from the home phone, and implement find-me/follow-me services that can ring one additional phone or multiple phones when a call comes in. That functionality is built into the same portal that enables customers to manage their bills and to program their digital video recorders via a PC.

Qwest announced its qHome Portal Oct. 9, uniting its Qwest Choice Home voice service and its DSL-based high-speed Internet service via Microsoft's Windows Live to allow customers to view and manage voicemail, e-mail and call logs from a PC. QHome launched in Colorado and will be available in Utah and Wyoming next, with Arizona and New Mexico to follow in early 2009.

“We have worked with Microsoft to bring together the strengths of both companies,” said Ken Rambo, director of product management for Qwest. “We have integrated the Qwest voice network, the Qwest messaging platform and the Qwest set of rich features with Microsoft Live's messaging platform, their IM platform and their Windows Live portal platform to create an elegant and simple customer experience.”