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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Saturday, March 19, 2005

Verizon directory mistakes under fire

By Stephanie Stoughton
Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. — For weeks, Rusty McGowan wondered why the phone for his waterscaping company had stopped ringing. Did he offend someone? Had his fish ponds and waterfalls failed to please?

Landscaping company owner Rusty McGowan says he lost out on $35,000 in business when Verizon listed his firm's number incorrectly.

Lisa Billings • Associated Press

Then he thumbed through the new phone book. Verizon Communications Inc., he realized, had published the wrong number for the business, Aqua-Scapes of Virginia/Virginia Waterscaping, in three Yellow Pages in the state. In the white pages, his company's listing was dropped altogether.

"They have ruined me," said McGowan, who says his Yellow Pages ads generate about half his sales. Verizon didn't charge him and offered him a free ad in one book, he said, but the damage was done. He estimates the omissions cost his Virginia Beach business about $35,000.

The nation's largest local phone company, based in New York, has made a series of embarrassing errors in its directories in recent years.

In a well publicized gaffe last year, as many as 12,000 Verizon telephone numbers that Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., customers had paid to keep unlisted were accidentally published.

In 2003, Verizon was forced to publish supplements to more than a dozen error-riddled directories in New York.

In Virginia, Verizon has bungled multiple phone books across the state several times. In the past year, about 700 businesses, residents and government offices have complained to state regulators about wrong numbers, misnamed companies and omitted listings.

Customers who tried to fix the problems say they had to wade through Verizon's bureaucracy, waiting on hold or unable to reach the right person. Some mistakes were compounded instead of corrected, and some corrections weren't made at all.

In January, the State Corporation Commission said it would investigate the company's white page directories, which fall under its regulations because they are part of basic phone service.

"Something is falling down in the process," said Kenneth Schrad, a spokesman for the agency.

Verizon representatives said they were working closely with state regulators. But they provided little detail about the mistakes and declined several times to discuss specific complaints.

"We have had directory errors, and we apologize for the inconvenience this causes our customers," said Mary De La Garza, a spokeswoman for Verizon Information Services, which publishes 1,200 directories and tens of millions of listings. "When we identify a directory error, we work diligently to figure out what happened, get it corrected and prevent it from happening again."

State regulators and some telecom analysts were puzzled by Verizon's directory mistakes, characterizing them as unusual for the company and the industry.

They say service providers have grappled in the past with phone book errors, but they were not aware of anything to the magnitude of the problems in Virginia.

Jay Pultz, an analyst at the research company Gartner Inc., said the problems weren't surprising considering the industry's cost-cutting and automation. "They might have gone too far in removing checks and balances," he said of Verizon.

Consumer advocates call Verizon's errors an illustration of how customer service has suffered while the phone company expanded to dominate the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

"I don't sense any desire from the folks I've worked with to really make things better for consumers. They're working real hard to take care of their bottom line," said Irene Leech, president of the Virginia Citizens Consumer Council.

Verizon hopes to expand further through an acquisition of MCI Inc. It's currently in a bidding war with Qwest Communications International Inc. for the long distance provider.

Customers say the directory mistakes have made life difficult for them.

Providence Hundred Enterprises Inc. told state regulators it was forced to change its name to "Deconomist" — because that's what Verizon mistakenly called the Suffolk mold-removal company in its SuperPages advertisement.

Verizon apparently picked up the name from an older draft of the ad and wouldn't fix that mistake and others in ensuing proofs, owner Simon Kiser said in an interview. After he called, Verizon assured him that the errors would be fixed before the book was published. They weren't.

"It would be funny if it didn't cost me money," he said.