Belgian online directory 1414.be gets a new look

Telephone directories and directory enquiry services are still consulted by tens of thousands of users every day.

In 2004, the Belgian company European Directory Assistance (EDA) launched the English-speaking 1414 directory enquiry service as an alternative to the similar services of the incumbent telephone operator. By breaking this monopoly position, EDA unleashed no less than a minor revolution. The online version followed in 2008. Meanwhile, we are 15 years on. Time for a rejuvenation cure. 1414.be will have a more user-friendly interface, allowing users to find information faster and more intuitively, and will become a responsive website that can be opened on all mobile devices. And of course it will still be possible to search for numbers of individuals and companies on www.1414.be, and find address details via the "reverse" directory. And all this is still free of charge. The online services come in addition to telephone directory enquiry services. Because yes, they still exist and they still get thousands of people on the line every day looking for a phone number.

European Directory Assistance (EDA) was founded by Alex Gaschard and Laurent Baeke who wanted to offer Belgium an alternative to the then existing telephone directory assistance service. In 2004, this alternative was launched under the numbers 12-12 (Dutch-speaking), 13-13 (French-speaking) and 14-14 (English-speaking).?As an outsider at the beginning of this century, it was far from obvious to compete with a heavyweight like Belgacom (now Proximus), which at the time held a monopoly position on the market. But both entrepreneurs knew the right course and managed to serve almost 20% of the market now almost 20 years later. In 2008, the year they had a capital increase, the online directory services 1414.be (Dutch-speaking), le1313.be (French-speaking) and 1414.be (English-speaking) were launched. Even today, both platforms are still consulted daily by thousands of users. These are mainly looking for the telephone number of local companies, but also for the number of private individuals. Also popular is the "reverse" directory function, a service not offered by traditional search engines. As recently as January, Proximus announced that it was putting a definitive end to its online directory enquiry service. 1414.be, on the other hand, is measuring itself with a new, fresher look for a better user experience.

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Telephone directory services are far from dead !

With 1414, users can retrieve all registered Belgian telephone numbers of private individuals, companies, public services and liberal professionals, as well as mobile phone numbers. The service also offers a "reverse" directory that allows the details of a telephone subscriber to be retrieved using his phone number. And if the caller queries the number using his smartphone, he will automatically receive an SMS with the number found. In 2006, telephone directory enquiry services still received 43 million calls/year and hundreds of operators were operating to answer all those calls. With the advent of smartphones, although those numbers have decreased considerably, these services continue to do remarkably well with still thousands of calls per day.

"In the words of Charles Aznavour, 'Je vous parle d'un temps que les moins de 20 ans ne peuvent pas conna?tre' (I'm talking about a time that people under 20 can't know)," laughs Alex Gaschard, CEO of EDA. "If you tell young people today that you can call telephone enquiries, they look at you wide-eyed, because they look for everything online. But their parents and especially their grandparents are still familiar with this way of finding phone records from an individual or a company as was the custom 20 years ago. And it is those grandparents who still call 14-14 today because they do not always have the technology or knowledge to search online. They still like to get a person "of flesh and blood" on the line to find the details they are looking for. So we still get thousands of calls every day, and we also clearly observe peaks at moments of crisis, such as the July 2021 floods. Mobile networks were overloaded or out of service at that time. So people were trying to contact their family or friends via landline and were looking for the numbers they didn't know via the directory enquiry services."

Social role

EDA's directory enquiry services can be accessed via both landlines and mobile phones, via the numbers 12-12 in Dutch, 13-13 in French and 14-14 in English. They can be reached round the clock and every day of the week, and are manned by specially trained operators. Moreover, these services also fulfil a social role and not only for senior citizens. They are also regularly used by municipal services, such as during lockdowns to contact elderly people and check if they are all right, or by doctors or hospitals when they are looking for patient numbers, or by the police ... To answer all these calls, the directory enquiry services need to have a correct database. "Of course, we only pass on the data of people who, when concluding their contract, have also given permission to be included in the directories or registered with the directory enquiry services. And I still want to make it very clear that under no circumstances do we pass on our data to call centres for telemarketing purposes!", Alex Gaschard further specifies.