Telepronto offers a one-number service to South Floridians with too many phones.

BY ROMINA GARBER

With so many ways to get in touch with a person, there is a growing need for simplicity -- and a South Florida company is aiming to meet that demand with a one-number-fits-all service.

TelePronto sells two services: ProntoNumber, which is for individuals, and ProntoAttendant, which is for corporations. Both of these services are based on one basic idea: one telephone number that follows a person wherever he goes.

Subscribers can choose a personal toll-free number or a local number. Once this number is dialed, ProntoNumber will contact the subscriber, wherever he is, by calling his cellular phone, home phone, work phone and any other number he has set up on his personal ProntoNumber account, which allows a maximum of four numbers.

’’Through a personal website, a person can set up a ProntoNumber and decide which of his phones should ring first. For instance, you can have it call your cell first and have it ring for 10 seconds and then if no one picks up, have it go straight to your voicemail or to your home number next, and so on,’’ said TelePronto President Alberto Navas. ``And since all these numbers stay within the ProntoNumber system, you don’t have to check the voicemail for four different phones -- just the ProntoNumber voicemail.’’

TelePronto is essentially a telephone managed by a computer. The website maintains a person’s settings, where he can change his preferences, change the telephone numbers for his ProntoNumber, and receive faxes and e-mails.

When a person receives a ProntoNumber call, a verbal caller ID offers the person the option to accept it, screen it, send it straight to voicemail or send a short message to the caller.

Voicemails can also be listened to from a computer as a WAV file, and faxes are stored as PDF files and forwarded to a ProntoNumber e-mail address as attachments. E-mails can even be received over the phone as spoken messages, and replied to or generated in a voice-to-text method.

When a customer goes out of the country, others can still contact him by calling the ProntoNumber. There are additional long distance fees for the subscriber.

’’These are normal fees, just like any long distance company,’’ said TelePronto Chief Financial Officer Marcelo Erlitz. ``This service can also provide detailed call reports that are available over the Internet.’’

The other service is ProntoAttendant, which is composed of layering ProntoNumbers. This sets up a ’’virtual office,’’ with a programmable Interactive Voice Response and includes all the features of ProntoNumber.

’’For instance, you call Company X’s main number, and a recording comes up that says press one for financial services, two for customer services and three for the director. Each of these numbers you press reaches a different ProntoNumber that in turn reaches four different numbers,’’ said Gustavo Pospischel, in charge of technical support for the company. ``These calls can be forwarded to any four numbers anywhere in the world and the number of inbound calls is unlimited.’’

This takes away the need for a central office, and if a company has five different locations, each number could represent a different one of its centers.

Jeff Kagan, an Atlanta-based independent telecommunications analyst, said this model has been around for a while but has not succeeded before because it was an idea ahead of its time.

’’The idea behind it is a sound idea: as things are getting more complex, we need simplicity,’’ Kagan said. ``I definitely think it’s a service whose time will come, and though I’ve seen it come in waves since the early 90s, this particular one may be a new twist on an old idea.’’