Phone Giant Vows To End ‘Slamming’ But At&T; Resists Measures Favored By Federal Regulators

AT&T Corp. on Tuesday came out swinging against the same marketing tactics it’s increasingly accused of: Switching phone customers’ longdistance service without their permission.

Blaming outside sellers of its phone service for the growing “slamming” problem, the nation’s largest long-distance company said it would curtail its use of independent sales agents, restrict resellers and start a phone hotline to answer customer complaints.

But while AT&T touted its “bold new initiatives” as promising to “eradicate slamming,” the company remained opposed to the most important protection federal regulators are considering: Exempting victims from long-distance phone charges made during the period of the unauthorized switch.

“We think putting in an incentive for free service will unnecessarily enter another element” into the problem, said Jack McMaster, AT&T’s vice president of consumer marketing. Instead, AT&T favors compensating consumers unknowingly switched for the difference between more expensive and cheaper phone rates.

Still, AT&T’s plan won cautious praise from consumer groups for addressing a problem that has grown alarmingly in recent years. Intensified rivalry by carriers for long-distance customers has spurred aggressive salesmen - often at small, little-known phone companies to sneakily switch more and more customers. The Federal Communications Commission recorded 20,000 slamming complaints last year, up from 16,000 in 1996.

AT&T has acknowledged that it has received complaints of slamming, but says they are only a small portion of its millions of phone calls each month. Some observers agree that many problems are caused by third-party vendors who resell service and sometimes misidentify themselves as AT&T.

“It’s not usually the big companies that are the problem, it’s the small renegade companies that use the names of these companies in their marketing,” said Jeffrey Kagan, who owns an industry consulting firm based in Atlanta.

In addition to reforming its own practices, AT&T urged the FCC, the nation’s telecommunications regulator, to require an independent third party to verify whenever a customer requests a change in service. AT&T also urged the agency to adopt rules that would compensate carriers whose customers have been slammed and penalize the responsible carriers $1,000 for each slamming incident.

“All of these sound like positive efforts to me,” said Gene Kimmelman, co-director of Consumers Union in Washington, a consumer group.

The FCC expects to decide on its stricter proposals within the next several months.

“The Commission is committed to solving the slamming problem and to creating economic disincentives for carriers to slam,” said Mary Beth Richards, acting deputy bureau chief in the FCC’s common carrier bureau.