Home
About Black Swan Editorial Mission Reports & Papers
Fraud Systems SIM Box Roaming Fraud PBX Fraud Subscription Databases
RA Practices Business Assurance RA Maturity RA Consulting Bill Testing
Wholesale Systems Net Inventory Margin Assure Partner Mgmt
Customer Behavior Machine Learning Network Analytics Marketing Analytics
Network Behavior Mobile & IoT Security Trusted Communication Signaling
Email a colleague    

June 2011

Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model

interview with Scott Swartz

Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model

“Capital isn‘t so important in business.  Experience isn’t so important.  You can get both of those things.  What is important is ideas.  If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn‘t any limit to what you can do with your business and your life.”

    — Harvey Firestone, founder of Firestone Tire (1868 — 1938)

With all due respect to Harvey Firestone, a great idea or killer app can’t stand alone.  It needs to work hand-in-hand with a killer business model and supporting systems.

Google and Facebook made billions by taking standard Web applications and wrapping great business models and systems around them.

Search engines and online advertising used to be ho-hum, low-margin businesses.  Then Google came along and combined the two to create a killer product — Google Ads.  Several years later, Facebook did Google Ads one better by allowing the user to choose which ads he or she considers relevant.

But is Google Ads an application or a billing system?  It’s both, really.  It combines: 1) search engine and Web-ad insertion applications; and 2) advertiser invoicing and Web-click-tally (usage) billing functions.

Now at the time, Google knew little about billing: It was an expert in search engines.  Yet the billing requirements for Google Ads were unique: Buying something off-the-shelf wasn’t an option because no one had ever asked for something like this before.

So Google built its own, and that billing system enabled the killer business model we now know as Google Ads.

Billing as business-model-enabler is a theme that Scott Swartz, CEO of Metratech, knows something about.  Scott’s been preaching that theme ever since he founded the billing company in 1998.  From the start, Scott chose to focus on companies that need to bill for “non-standard” business models (as well as a few standard business models too!).  In fact, the more innovative and challenging the requirements, the more MetraTech stands apart.

Now, your company may not be experiencing new competitive forces that demand new billing functionality today or tomorrow, but your perspective on billing’s future will certainly be sharpened by reading my conversation with Scott, who explains his company’s unique business model and why the business world we’re entering needs all the billing flexibility it can muster.

Black Swan: Scott, the niche your company addresses is highly complex billing.  But I’m curious how you differentiate yourself when there are so many billing vendors who excel in rating.

Scott Swartz: Complexity alone does not explain our niche.  There are really two issues here: complexity and an architecture-breaking business model -- the kinds of conditions we are seeing now in highly dynamic industries like Cloud Services, Financial Services, and Smart Grid.  For example, when you have a one-to-many relationship such as 1-800-BUY-A-FORD and you want to send sales leads to individual regions and bill the regions separately — that’s simple in concept but it broke all the other billing systems who tried it.

A simple 800-number like 1-800-444-XXXX belongs to one company and every charge goes to that one account.  But in the case of 800-BUY-A-FORD, the 800-number belongs to 60 organizations, and based on the originating area code, we’re going to dynamically route that call to the place it should go.

If the call comes from a New Jersey area code, the call is routed to the Ford dealer in New Jersey and they will also pick up the bill for those calls.

The company we supplied that solution had some very nice Web software that monitored the call volume for these vanity 800-numbers, and that allowed them to deliver a nice campaign management program to their clients.  After a while, you could start to correlate the effectiveness of certain advertisements to call volume.  They could even tell you how many times the phone rang before it was picked up and so forth.

All of this was enabled by changing the billing-systems architecture.  Now this isn’t something I would call highly complex.  But it certainly is a unique requirement.  If your solution doesn‘t fit in the box, you can’t serve the customer.  You’re either in the box or out of the box.  It’s as if your solution fits in the box perfectly except for a pole stick out on one end — namely a special requirement you can‘t easily meet.

That’s an architecture-breaking requirement.  And to solve that problem requires you to flex your business process dynamics.

Can you characterize what sorts of companies are attracted to your kind of nontraditional billing solution?

Many of the billing solutions today were designed for a particular vertical market such as how wireless business should work or how an airport should work.

These solutions are designed to fulfill the generic needs of 95 percent of a customer type in a certain industry.  But if an innovator comes along and wants to do something different or the business becomes complex, you hit a wall.  The largest telecom billing vendors have very strong capabilities.  They manage many simple tasks very well.  But as you start to get into the complex requirements, that’s where they are challenged.  It’s when you need to do lots fancy stuff in rating, price plans, partner compensation, customer hierarchies, ICBs, different currencies, and discounting.

Now a telecom might be selling bundles, but if it’s based on basic subscriptions, it’s really not complex.  However, if it includes some crazy cross-product discount and the billing is rated dynamically, then that’s our kind of complexity.  We look for companies in a dynamic or high-velocity business mode.

Microsoft, for example, figured it needed to increase the velocity of its billing processes, and they needed that in 18 months, so they did a bake-off that ultimately selected Metratech against a large billing competitor.  Another customer of ours grew from 100 to 150 million customers in one year organically.  Using their prior system, they were bleeding $80,000 a day.  The business was based on a simple $9.95 per month credit-card-based subscription, but they also wanted to sell to large corporations and faced some complex business model dynamics around settlements.

The CFO told me: “If I wanted to solve only today’s problem, I would have bought from somebody else, but I’m buying for the problem I’m going to have.”

It’s kind of hard to determine whether billing is getting simpler or more complex.  On one hand you have services like the iPhone wireless broadband that’s billing in the U.S. at a flat rate.  On the other side, you have things like cloud computing where the number of ecosystem players suggests billing will be very complex.

SS: Often the difference comes down to where the billing complexity occurs.  For instance, a free service is often “advertising-based,“ which entails settlements in the background that could be with multi-party, usage based — even dynamically priced.

So billing’s like that.  Simplicity in consumer billing might mean an increase in complexity at the ecosystem or distribution channel layers.

One area where complexity seems to grow is enterprise billing.

Telecom-to-enterprise billing is largely an unsolved problem.  Enterprise customers are disappointed in its inaccuracy and lack of flexibility.  Hierarchies are very hard to sort out.  Some customers say: “Bill me for service X on the 14th and bill me for service Y on the 23rd — all at one customer.  Then there are different bills going to different cost centers.

Billing has certainly come a long ways.  When TRI wrote its first billing research report in 1995, most of the billing systems were custom-built and hard-coded systems written by an Andersen Consulting (Accenture) or AMS (CGI).  Then the first commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems appeared from folks like Kenan Systems (Comverse) and that changed the game.

I agree.  The COTS solutions revolutionized billing.  Perhaps the most enduring thing they accomplished was to create a new role — the offer administrator — a non-technical person who could sit down at a GUI and write calling plans and rates without writing code.  And the mechanism for accomplishing that was moving the pricing and service bundles into a relational database where prices and simple bundling became table driven.

However, if you want to change the data model or business model, the COTS solution will be challenged.  With 3 or 4 million lines of code, if you want to disassociate a telephone number from an account, you can‘t do that because the logic is hard-wired.  So if having an innovative business model is important to you, a COTS solution often takes you no further than a custom system.

Ideally, the business analyst should be involved in the billing architecture from the beginning, but instead they’re now relegated to a secondary role and are forced to ask the developer: “Can you do it this way?  What’s that going to take?” And the developer typically comes back and says something like: “Well, this is going to take three to six months to implement.”

So if you can empower the business analyst, you can change the underlying data model — the GUIs, APIs and workflow — on the fly.

Now, IT can still make the changes to the system, but the answer to “when can I get this change implemented” will be no longer than six months.  And this means you’re able to do things that would normally require the massive coding a new release of software.

What’s the technical “secret sauce“ that makes your billing solution different?

In a word, it’s “metadata.“ Everyone has got some level of metadata, but Metranet makes pervasive use of it.  The metadata drives what the real data looks like.

We basically encapsulate the billing process at a lower level — namely the data architecture level.  What we do is allow the business analyst to define what that reference data looks like.

So a company like the City of Chicago comes to us and says: “We need to model take-off and landing charges to the airlines.“ But their system never had that capability before.  Well, our system allows a business analyst to come in and design a new service called www.OHareAirport.com/landingcharge.

And that service is going to have reference data such as Flight_Number, MTOFF for Maximum TakeOff Rate, NUM_Passengers for Number of Passengers on board the plane, NUM_Landing_Time for the time landed and so forth.  All of these are new requirements that are inadequately modeled in the original COTS or custom billing system.  So a new data model is needed, and that means the database, processing engine, GUI and API you originally designed are no longer good enough.

When you think about it, any kind of enterprise software needs 4 critical elements: 1) a consistent scheme for storing data; 2) some sort of transaction processing — it could be ordering, taxing, etc.; 3) a GUI is also needed to present the data; and lastly, 4) APIs are needed because you have to integrate with other systems.  If you can do those four things, you’re good to go.

The only trouble with a traditional architecture maintains a fairly fixed schema for representing phone numbers and other foundational metadata.  But what our metadata system does is create the database schema on the fly.  So it creates all the fields you need on the fly and our engine wasn‘t pre-defined to tell what those particular fields mean and how they should interact.

This article first appeared in Billing and OSS World.

Copyright 2011 Black Swan Telecom Journal

 
Scott Swartz

Scott Swartz

Scott Swartz is the CEO of Metratech.  Prior to founding MetraTech in 1998, he was director of Product Marketing and Business Development at NetCentric, a provider of carrier-class Internet fax systems.  He holds a Bachelor’s degree in electrical, computer and systems engineering from Harvard.

MetraTech offers an innovative approach to billing, compensation and self-care for customers, suppliers and channels.  It empowers organizations to embrace change through a unique Agreements-based Billing (ABB) and compensation solution.

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

cSwans of a Feather

  • The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing.  The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
  • Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new  system designed to address the new telecom era?  An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
  • Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change.  Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating.  In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
  • Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques.  The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
  • A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain.  Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.

Related Articles

  • Tokopedia, Indonesia’s E-Commerce King, Partners with 11 Million Merchants; Adopts Multi-Cloud to Drive Innovation — interview with Warren Aw & Ryan de Melo — Indonesia’s Tokopedia, founded in 2009, has grown to become one of world’s leading e-commerce players.  Read about its success, technology direction, and multi-cloud connectivity adoption.
  • Bridge Alliance: Knocking Down Regional & Mobile Connectivity Barriers so Connected Car Markets Get Rolling in Asia — interview with Kwee Kchwee — The CEO of an Asian consortium of mobile operators explains how they  help simplify and harmonize their members‘ operations in support of multi-national corporations.  This integration is enabling two huge industries to come together in Asia: auto manufacturing and telco.
  • Epsilon’s Infiny NaaS Platform Brings Global Connection, Agility & Fast Provision for IoT, Clouds & Enterprises in Southeast Asia, China & Beyond — interview with Warren Aw — Network as a Service, powered by Software Defined Networks, are a faster, more agile, and more partner-friendly way of making data global connections.  A leading NaaS provider explains the benefits for cloud apps, enterprise IT, and IoT.
  • PCCW Global: On Leveraging Global IoT Connectivity to Create Mission Critical Use Cases for Enterprises — interview with Craig Price — A leading wholesale executive explains the business challenges of the current global IoT scene as it spans many spheres: technical, political, marketing, and enterprise customer value creation.
  • Senet’s Cloud & Shared Gateways Drive LoRaWAN IoT Adoption for Enterprise Businesses, Smart Cities & Telecoms — interview with Bruce Chatterley — An IoT netowork pioneer explains how LoRaWAN tech fits in the larger IoT ecosystem.  He gives use case examples, describes deployment restraints/costs, and shows how partnering, gateway sharing, and flexible deployment options are stimulating growth.
  • ARM Data Center Software’s Cloud-Based Network Inventory Links Network, Operations, Billing, Sales & CRM to One Database — interview with Joe McDermott & Frank McDermott — A firm offering a cloud-based network inventory system explains the virtues of: a single underlying database, flexible conversions, task-checking workflow, new software business models, views that identify stranded assets, and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud platform.
  • Pure Play NFV: Lessons Learned from Masergy’s Virtual Deployment for a Global Enterprise — interview with Prayson Pate — NFV is just getting off the ground, but one cloud provider to enterprises making a stir in virtual technology waters is Masergy.  Here are lessons learned from Masergy’s recent global deployment using a NFV pure play software approach.
  • The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing.  The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
  • Delivering Service Assurance Excellence at a Reduced Operating Cost — interview with Gregg Hara — The great diversity and complexity of today’s networks make service assurance a big challenge.  But advances in off-the-shelf software now permit the configuring and visualizing of services across multiple technologies on a modest operating budget.
  • Are Cloud-Based Call Centers the Next Hot Product for the SMB Market? — interview with Doron Dovrat — Quality customer service can improve a company’s corporate identity and drive business growth.  But many SMBs are priced out of acquiring modern call center technology.  This article explains the benefits of affordable and flexible cloud-based call centers.
  • Flexing the OSS & Network to Support the Digital Ecosystem — interview with Ken Dilbeck — The need for telecoms to support a broader digital ecosystem requires an enormous change to OSS infrastructures and the way networks are being managed.  This interview sheds light on these challenges.
  • Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new  system designed to address the new telecom era?  An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
  • Paradigm Shift in OSS Software: Network Topology Views via Enterprise-Search — interview with Benedict Enweani — Enterprise-search is a wildly successful technology on the web, yet its influence has not yet rippled to the IT main stream.  But now a large Middle Eastern operator has deployed a major service assurance application using enterprise-search.  The interview discusses this multi-dimensional topology solution and compares it to traditional network inventory.
  • The Multi-Vendor MPLS: Enabling Tier 2 and 3 Telecoms to Offer World-Class Networks to SMBs — interview with Prabhu Ramachandran — MPLS is a networking technology that has caught fire in the last decade.  Yet the complexity of MPLS has relegated to being mostly a large carrier solution.  Now a developer of a multi-vendor MPLS solutions explains why the next wave of MPLS adoption will come from tier 2/3 carriers supporting SMB customers.
  • Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change.  Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating.  In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
  • Driving Customer Care Results & Cost Savings from Big Data Facts — interview with Brian Jurutka — Mobile broadband and today’s dizzying array of app and network technology present a big challenge to customer care.  In fact, care agents have a hard time staying one step ahead of customers who call to report problems.  But network analytics comes to the rescue with advanced mobile handset troubleshooting and an ability to put greater intelligence at the fingertips of highly trained reps.
  • Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems.  This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
  • The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers.  But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process.  This white paper points to a solution — a collaborative solution designs system — and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
  • Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation.  This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings.  The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
  • Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds.  Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
  • Decom Dilemma: Why Tearing Down Networks is Often Harder than Deploying Them — interview with Dan Hays — For every new 4G LTE and IP-based infrastructure deployed, there typically a legacy network that’s been rendered obsolete and needs to be decommissioned.  This article takes you through the many complexities of network decom, such as facilities planning, site lease terminations, green-safe equipment disposal, and tax relief programs.
  • Migration Success or Migraine Headache: Why Upfront Planning is Key to Network Decom — interview with Ron Angner — Shutting down old networks and migrating customers to new ones is among the most challenging activities a network operators does today.  This article provides advice on the many network issues surrounding migration and decommissioning.  Topics discussed include inventory reconciliation, LEC/CLEC coordination, and protection of customers in the midst of projects that require great program management skills.
  • Navigating the Telecom Solutions Wilderness: Advice from Some Veteran Mountaineers — interview with Al Brisard — Telecom solutions vendors struggle mightily to position their solutions and figure out what to offer next in a market where there’s considerable product and service crossover.  In this article, a veteran order management specialist firm lays out its strategy for mixing deep-bench functional expertise with process consulting, analytics, and custom API development.
  • Will Telecoms Sink Under the Weight of their Bloated and Out-of-Control Product Stacks? — interview with Simon Muderack — Telecoms pay daily for their lack of product integration as they constantly reinvent product wheels, lose customer intelligence, and waste time/money.  This article makes the case of an enterprise product catalog.  Drawing on central catalog cases at a few Tier 1 operators, the article explains the benefits: reducing billing and provisioning costs, promoting product reuse, and smoothing operations.
  • Virtual Operator Life: Enabling Multi-Level Resellers Through an Active Product Catalog — interview with Rob Hill — The value of product distribution via virtual operators is immense.  They enable a carrier to sell to markets it cannot profitably serve directly.  Yet the need for greater reseller flexibility in the bundling and pricing of increasingly complex IP and cloud services is now a major channel barrier.  This article explains what’s behind an innovative product catalog solution that doubles as a service creation environment for resellers in multiple tiers.
  • Telecom Blocking & Tackling: Executing the Fundamentals of the Order-to-Bill Process — interview with Ron Angner — Just as football teams need to be good at the basics of blocking and tackling, telecoms need to excel at their own fundamental skillset: the order-to-cash process.  In this article, a leading consulting firm explains its methodology for taking operators on the path towards order-to-cash excellence.  Issues discussed include: provisioning intervals; standardization and simplicity; the transition from legacy to improved process; and the major role that industry metrics play.
  • Wireline Act IV, Scene II: Packaging Network & SaaS Services Together to Serve SMBs — by John Frame — As revenue from telephony services has steadily declined, fixed network operators have scrambled to support VoIP, enhanced IP services, and now cloud applications.  This shift has also brought challenges to the provisioning software vendors who support the operators.  In this interview, a leading supplier explains how it’s transforming from plain ol‘ OSS software provider to packager of on-net and SaaS solutions from an array of third party cloud providers.
  • Telecom Merger Juggling Act: How to Convert the Back Office and Keep Customers and Investors Happy at the Same Time — interview with Curtis Mills — Billing and OSS conversions as the result of a merger are a risky activity as evidenced by famous cases at Fairpoint and Hawaiian Telcom.  This article offers advice on how to head off problems by monitoring key operations checkpoints, asking the right questions, and leading with a proven conversion methodology.
  • Is Order Management a Provisioning System or Your Best Salesperson? — by John Konczal — Order management as a differentiator is a very new concept to many CSP people, but it’s become a very real sales booster in many industries.  Using electronics retailer BestBuy as an example, the article points to several innovations that can — and are — being applied by CSPs today.  The article concludes with 8 key questions an operator should ask to measure advanced order management progress.
  • NEC Takes the Telecom Cloud from PowerPoint to Live Customers — interview with Shinya Kukita — In the cloud computing world, it’s a long road from technology success to telecom busness opportunity.  But this story about how NEC and Telefonica are partnering to offer cloud services to small and medium enterprises shows the experience of early cloud adoption.  Issues discussed in the article include: customer types, cloud application varieties, geographic region acceptance, and selling challenges.
  • Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques.  The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
  • Real-Time Provisioning of SIM Cards: A Boon to GSM Operators — interview with Simo Isomaki — Software-controlled SIM card configuration is revolutionizing the activation of GSM phones.  The article explains how dynamic SIM management decouples the selection of numbers/services and delivers new opportunities to market during the customer acquisition and intial provisoining phase.
  • A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain.  Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.
  • Achieving Revenue Maximization in the Telecom Contact Center — interview with Robert Lamb — Optimizing the contact center offers one of the greatest returns on investment for a CSP.  The director of AT&T’s contact center services business explains how telecoms can strike an “artful balance” between contact center investment and cost savings.  The discussion draws from AT&T’s consulting with world class customers like Ford, Dell, Discover Financial, DISH Network, and General Motors.
  • Mobile Broadband: The Customer Service Assurance Challenge — interview with Michele Campriani — iPhone and Android traffic is surging but operators struggle with network congestion and dropping ARPUs.  The answer?  Direct  resources and service quality measures to ensure VIPs are indeed getting the quality they expect.  Using real-life examples that cut to the chase of technical complexities, this article explains the chief causes of service quality degradation and describes efficient ways to deal with the problem.
  • Telco-in-a-Box: Are Telecoms Back in the B/OSS Business? — interview with Jim Dunlap — Most telecoms have long since folded their merchant B/OSS software/services businesses.  But now Cycle30, a subsidiary of Alaskan operator GCI, is offering a order-to-cash managed service for other operators and utilities.  The article discusses the company’s unique business model and contrasts it with billing service bureau and licensed software approaches.
  • Bricks, Mortar & Well-Trained Reps Make a Comeback in Customer Management — interview with Scott Kohlman — Greater industry competition, service complexity, and employee turnover have raised the bar in the customer support.  Indeed, complex services are putting an emphasis on quality care interactions in the store, on the web, and through the call center.  In this article you’ll learn about innovations in CRM, multi-tabbed agent portals,  call center agent training, customer treatment philosophies, and the impact of  self-service.
  • 21st Century Order Management: The Cross-Channel Sales Conversation — by John Konczal — Selling a mobile service is generally not a one-and-done transaction.  It often involves several interactions — across the web, call center, store, and even kiosks.  This article explains the power of a “cross-channel hub” which sits above all sales channels, interacts with them all, and allows a CSP to keep the sales conversation moving forward seamlessly.
  • Building a B/OSS Business Through Common Sense Customer Service — by David West — Delivering customer service excellence doesn‘t require mastering some secret technique.  The premise of this article is that plain dealing with customers and employees is all that’s needed for a winning formula.  The argument is spelling out in a simple 4 step methodology along with some practical examples.