Vendors Help Pay the Bills
By Monica Alleven
WirelessWeek - February 15, 2008
Whether improving the activation process or evaluating customer usage patterns, companies stand ready to help carriers sign up and keep their customers.
The weekend of June 29 last year was one of little sleep for the folks stationed at Synchronoss Technologies' operations center in Bethlehem, Penn. Talk about being in the eye of the storm. Synchronoss' task was to manage and provision the activation process for the iPhone.
Soon after stores opened to sell the device, new iPhone owners started sharing their experiences, with some bloggers chronicling their hours-long attempts to get devices activated. Omar Tellez, executive vice president of marketing at Synchronoss, admits complications arose in some areas, such as porting from existing carriers and business users moving to consumer accounts, but he says the majority of those issues were dealt with and Synchronoss is proud of its efforts.
It wasn't your run-of-the-mill activation process. In the traditional method, customers go into a retail store, wait for an agent and go through a tedious process. But for the iPhone, the experience needed to be 3 to 5 minutes, something customers could do online from the comfort of their homes. Synchronoss worked with both AT&T and Apple for six to nine months prior to the launch, trying to minimize the amount of data customers would need to provide, yet making sure all the proper validation was in place.
TO THE FRONT
Improving the end-user experience is what it's all about, whether the carrier is AT&T or someone else. Of course, there's no shortage of billing and customer care vendors eager to help out. They're also quick to point out that they're now in the business of bringing what's traditionally a backoffice service to the front office.
Howard Woolf, group president of Comverse's Converged Billing Group, says billing really started moving from the backoffice to the front office years ago with the then-revolutionary MCI Friends & Family campaign, which gave a lower rate for calls made to people in a customer's calling circle.
Today, Comverse is seeing more demand for converged billing systems, whether they be prepaid/postpaid or the ones that include mobile, wireline, Internet and cable, he says. In the wireless prepaid arena, the company last year extended its relationship with Alltel Wireless with a 5-year managed services contract to operate and support its real-time billing environment.
Usually, U.S. operators treat prepaid customers more akin to an island, but Alltel wanted to link together its systems, enabling it to be more flexible in the market and go after segments other carriers weren't going after, Woolf says. Marketing features allow Alltel to respond to its customers with the right offer at the right time. "They can spin up a variety of offerings very quickly," he says.
But some smaller companies are challenging the big billing companies - Comverse being among them - in an attempt to turn the billing world upside down. "It's almost like those big billing systems are jack-of-all trades, master of none," says Dave McNierney, vice president of market development at pricing and rating provider Highdeal. "The infrastructure the operators run should be oriented toward empowering the front office. We're talking about one system supporting both the front office function as well as the backoffice function and integrating that into the existing billing infrastructure."
The challenge for Highdeal is not in the price of its software, he says. Compared to costs associated with existing billing systems, the cost is "nothing. We're talking not even in that realm." Rather, the challenge is getting the word out that alternatives are available.
Highdeal has been conducting the annual Highdeal Challenge, where it invites service providers to describe their most complex problems or challenging pricing scenarios, and the company will demonstrate a solution within 24 hours. In four years, there hasn't been a single scenario where Highdeal couldn't come up with a solution, he says.
INDIVIDUAL LEVEL
Of course, billing is closely tied to customer service, and one of the core areas of focus involves minimizing the pain the customer goes through when they have a problem. "One of the challenges we're working with now is how do you structure your call centers and customer service systems so you are getting the customer to the person with the right expertise and tools to solve their problems," says Robert Purks, the senior executive who leads the North American billing practice in Accenture's Communications Group. "I think we're seeing an increased focus on carriers trying to get to know their customers."
Billing and customer care companies also talk about applying better analytics to customer account data. Aperio CI's Website, for one, proclaims "You know your customers better than you think." Every service-based business possesses the unique activity records of individual customer accounts, but few companies capitalize on their proprietary resources, Aperio says.
One way to boost customer loyalty is to track usage patterns and offer to put customers on a plan better suited to their voice and data needs, whether it be a higher-end plan or lower-end plan. But those kinds of offers should not be based on just one month's service, says Aperio CI CEO Duffy Mich. Aperio recommends using six months worth of data. "We're really talking about analyzing one customer at a time," he says.
A few years ago, before Rogers Wireless bought the Fido brand, Microcell in Canada was charging by the second while competitors charged by the minute. The carrier didn't tout that fact until after it worked with Aperio and introduced a savings challenge on its Website. Through analytics on the back end, Aperio was able to show how consumers could save considerably by going with Fido, Mich says.
But considering how much data is in carriers' hands, why aren't more of them using it more effectively? Every carrier has immense data on an individual's dropped calls, device and customer care history. However, it's not all in one central location. "Knowing a lot is different from doing something about it," notes Perry Chaturvedi, wireless industry director at Convergys.
Aperio and others warn that U.S. operators will need to pay better attention to billing and customer care as the industry moves away from an emphasis on net additions and focuses more on keeping existing customers. In Western Europe, where some countries have more than 100% penetration, carriers recognize that losing a customer is crucial, says Frost & Sullivan Analyst Daniel Longfield. But in the U.S. market, the pool of lucrative new customers is narrowing, and carriers probably consider the consumers who haven't yet signed up for service as ones who aren't going to use their phones enough to really pay off, he says.
Eventually, carriers will turn to solutions like Aperio's, he adds. "I know from experience than nothing frustrates a customer more than getting a $400 bill because they were not on the right plan."
About Aperio CI
Aperio CI is regarded as a leading provider of advanced analytics solutions that empower service providers to maximize revenue and profitability. Aperio CI applies proprietary software applications and techniques to a client"s complete transaction records, creating a detailed view of customer usage and/or purchasing behavior. By integrating that model with a comprehensive database of market and competitive intelligence, Aperio CI enables its clients to develop and execute innovative and targeted marketing programs that acquire new customers, retain existing ones, increase customer satisfaction and ensure more profitable performance. Aperio CI is based in the New York area, and maintains offices in New Jersey, Atlanta, San Antonio and has an affiliated entity in the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.AperioCI.com.
For more information, contact:
Lynn McAuley
Aperio CI
+1 (631) 468-4014
lynn.mcauley@aperioci.com
Glen Zimmerman
Netezza
+1 (508) 382-8267
gzimmerman@netezza.com