The Sri Lanka Telecom 1213 Toll Free Service to find Residential Directory Information was dedicated for public use by the Chairperson Sri Lanka Telecom, Mrs Leisha De SIlva Chandrasena at the Galadari Hotel, Colombo amidst a large and representative gathering.

At the media briefing Mr Malraj Balapitiya, the CEO of SLT Publications said that during the recent past, the SLT customer base has increased drastically and it is impossible for SLT to include the names of all the customers in one printed directory. Since the printing of a single complete directory that includes the entire SLT customer base has not been feasible, SLT publishes provincial and district based directories to overcome this problem. However customers have difficulty in seeking numbers outside their province.

Mr. Ruwan WIjetunga, the General Manager - Sales and Marketing

Mr. Ruwan WIjetunga, the General Manager - Sales and Marketing of SLT Rainbow Pages said that as a responsible corporate entity that seeks to give customer the ultimate satisfaction and convenience, SLT studied this situation in depth and obtained customer's views at various forums, seminars, outreach programmes and surveys to find viable solutions.

From feedback it was revealed that when customer's referred the printed directory, surnames like Perera, Fernando etc., ran into over 75 pages and thereby searching for the particular contact number posed many problems. In some instances the telephone had been registered under one name and used by the entire family but the family members or actual user names were not listed in the directory. It's very common that the person who is seeking information knows only a part of the name and a phrase of the street, town or the house name. Obliviously in such situation manual search is practically impossible.

Further Directories are only published in English and don't cater to the Sinhala and Tamil masses. Furthermore, the printed directory is only published annually and hence the latest updates cannot be included in the directory Thus, SLT was keen to eliminate these problems and seek a viable solution to make access to residential directory information easy. Finally, SLT came up with a very convenient solution to offer Residential Directory Inquiry services through their Call Center Service to SLT customers absolutely free.

Mr Malraj Balapitiya, the CEO of SLT

A special user friendly short code - 1213 has been introduced to help customers to obtain this service 24 hours of the day, 365 days of the year. SLT feels that the new 1213 service will be advantageous to the public in conveniently finding any contact number islandwide in the customer's preferred languages of choice.

Unlike the annually printed Directories, Call Center database is updated continuously and subscribers will have access to the latest contact information.

The SLT Call Center comprises well experienced customer friendly, efficient staff and a powerful state-of-the-art search engine has been developed to enable the location of a number in seconds. This powerful mechanism will help the customers to find a name in seconds by knowing a phrase of the street, address or the name.

During the Directory distribution for Western Province customers, choice of the customers for the proposed 1213 Call Center Service has been collected and got an overwhelmingly positive response and selected some customers via a Raffle Draw. The winners of this draw received valuable gifts including airline tickets from the Chairperson SLT at a ceremonial function held at the Hotel Galadari.

The Chairperson of SLT, Mrs. Leisha De SIlva Chandrasena said that the new subsidiary SLT Publications (Pvt.) Ltd., is doing exceedingly well and is on par with international Directory publishers by introducing innovative solutions to customers needs via other media such as the Directory CD, Rainbow Pages Web Portal and WAP for mobile phone users. .