New telephone service can filter sales calls

Ameritech Corp. is offering what it says is a first-of-its-kind service to filter out those annoying sales calls that always seem to come during dinner.

"The message is loud and clear. Our customers simply want control over telemarketing," Diane Primo, president of product management for Ameritech, said yesterday, the first day the service was offered in parts of Chicago and Detroit.

It will be expanded to Ameritech customers throughout the Great Lakes region next year and also will be offered to other phone companies, officials said.

Here's how it works:

First, a customer must have Caller ID. Then callers whose numbers come through as "unavailable" or "unknown" are intercepted by a greeting.

"The number you are calling has Privacy Manager" the message begins and then asks the caller to identify himself or herself after a beep.

If the caller does so, the call then rings through to the recipient, who has three options: to accept the call, to decline the call or to decline the call and tell the caller - namely, a telemarketer - not to call again.

Ameritech officials say the beauty of the system is that seven out of every 10 unidentified callers, often salespeople, simply hang up, according to data from product tests. That means the phone never rings.

"That's a lot of dinners, movies and bedtime stories that went uninterrupted," said John Rooney, president of Ameritech consumer services.

There are a few inconveniences, namely for friends and family members who have their numbers blocked from caller ID - or who call from pay phones or states that don't transmit their phone numbers - and, thus, have to go through the screening process every time they call from an unidentified number.

There's also a few-second lapse added to the bill of every long-distance caller who doesn't hang up.

Ameritech officials, who are in the process of patenting the Privacy Manager software so they can offer it to other phone companies, say the inconveniences are minimal. In fact, they say tests of the product have shown it to be the company's most popular service in more than a decade.

Reviews on the streets of downtown Chicago yesterday were mixed.

Several people said they would rather let their answering machines or voice mail screen the calls for them than pay the extra money. The Privacy Manager costs $3.95 a month in addition to the approximate $7.50 charged monthly for caller ID.

Susan Repa says she convinced her husband to answer and say, "Thanks but no thanks."

"We're cheap. We'd rather save our money for retirement than give it to the phone company," said Repa, who works in Chicago and lives in the northwestern Illinois town of Capron.

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