Cox Communications is marketing a new service to local customers that allows them to manage their phone service online.
Cox Phone Tools, a free service for customers who subscribe to both Cox Digital Telephone and Cox High Speed Internet, enables customers to receive an instant e-mail notification when there is a new voice mail and listen to voice-mails messages online, view a log of incoming and outgoing calls, save voice messages and telephone numbers on a computer, and forward voicemails as e-mail attachments.
The Phone Tools service being marketed in Rhode Island this month is accessed through a secure Web portal at cox.net that enables customers to manage their telephone features from any computer with Internet service.
The new offering comes as Atlanta-based Cox – the state’s predominant cable-television provider and nation’s third-largest cable company – continues to integrate and expand its telephone, Internet and cable services as the traditional cable and telecom industries merge, said Joan Lawlor, product manager for telephony services at Cox.
Cox has offered digital telephone service for nearly 10 years, along with high-speed Internet service. To create Phone Tools, the company engaged in an extended development effort, Lawlor said.
In beginning to offer local residential customers a pure Voice-over-IP telephony platform that integrates telephones, PCs, cell phones and other wireless devices, Cox becomes a competitor in a market that already includes the Holmdel, N.J.-based VoIP company Vonage.
New York-based Verizon Communications, Rhode Island’s dominant telephone company and a growing cable provider in the state, also offers its residential customers VoIP capabilities.
Cox began a widespread rollout of Voice Tools to more than 2 million of its telephone customers in late November, when it began offering the telephony service in parts of Georgia and Florida.
Last year, Cox partnered with Sprint-Nextel to offer Cox cell phone service via Sprint’s network. Phone Tools connects Cox’s digital telephone, Internet and cell phone services, enabling customers to operate with a single phone number and messaging center across multiple networks and platforms.
“You are going to want to access your services obviously away from home as much as you’re accessing them in home,” she said. “For instance, I went away this holiday and it wasn’t [until] I got to my mom’s house that I realized I didn’t call forward my home line to my wireless line. Prior to having Phone Tools that would have been a lost opportunity, but I was able to get online and do that forwarding remotely.”
Cox will promote its Phone Tools service heavily, Lawlor said. The company is in the process of identifying specific customers who would be particularly interested in various features now available to them through Phone Tools, she said.
“There are features that are going to be useful to all segments of the marketplace,” Lawlor said. “If you think of your residential customer who has teenagers in the household, they would certainly be interested in seeing who’s calling into that household and who those teenagers are calling.
“Then there are sets of people who may have relatives in other parts of the world and want to share the news when they hear news,” she continued. “If you were to have gotten some exciting message on your voice mail – say it’s some mother who has a son in Iraq, right?
“Not only could she be notified of that voice mail immediately, then she could take that voice-mail [message] and send it to every family member. So they could not only understand that they got a call from him, but also hear his voice and hear how he’s doing.” •
