July 2011

“Fraud Is a Wind that Always Blows” and Other Wisdom From a 28-Year Old Software Firm

interview with Gary Beck

If you’ve read my other columns, you know that most of them focus on a particular industry theme or trend.

This one’s going to be different. This column is about the history of one company, Beck Computers, founded and run by Gary Beck. Yes, my interview covers fraud management software, which is Beck’s specialty, but this story is also about how a tiny (15-employee) software firm can succeed in the B/OSS market — and even serve Tier 1 carriers.

I should have run into Beck Computers years ago, particularly since they have some marquis accounts and their customers process hundreds of millions of CDRs a day. But somehow Beck evaded my radar until fraud expert, Jim Marsh, told me about the firm a few weeks ago.

The company began in 1983 when Gary teamed up with his Dad to form the company. Dad was an antique dealer. It’s questionable whether or not Dad actually ever turned on a computer in his life, but fear not: Dad did know a thing or two about business, and Gary was prepared to supply the computer expertise anyway. The company’s original products were outside telecom — in areas like inventory control, accounting, and logistics. In fact, Beck Computers is still serving some of the same customers today, although 95 percent of its business these days is creating and selling fraud management software and systems.

I’d planned for this interview with Gary to be short and sweet. But I didn’t count on a couple of things. Number one: Gary’s quite the talker; and two: he has a lot of interesting things to say. So my original plan was out the window. Suffice it to say that Gary and I spent an entertaining hour on the phone together. And that resulted in this double-sized blog, which will inspire the entrepreneurial spirit that shines — brightly or dimly — in telecom software firms large or small.

	Dan Baker: TRI has been in business since 1994 and I thought that was a long time, but Beck Computers beats me by eleven years. So what’s your longevity secret, Gary?

Gary Beck: First of all, Dan, we are not a sales organization selling software. We are a service company that truly partners with our customers. And I think this philosophy is what’s allowed us to survive.

	Can you qualify that statement a bit? Lots of companies tell me they are partners with their customers. Why do you believe Beck’s any better?

I think the difference is we treat another company’s requirements, their system, and their money as if it was our own. I don’t advise my customers to buy a bigger computer they don’t need. And I’m not always trying to sell them more software. We’ve created some great relationships and I make money from them over the long term.

We like to drop a black box solution into a customer’s organization and in that way we minimize the need for IT to waste precious resources managing it. If the computer causes any sort of trouble, they call us and we handle it, period. And that’s not the typical support you get elsewhere. We support our users and computers as mission critical systems. One of our customers has a system that has been up for four years and never been down. Our software and our hardware is designed to be highly available.

	It’s pretty amazing that a tiny software firm like yours is handling fraud management for a carrier processing almost 200 million CDRs a day. Tell us how that started.

Well, we had the good fortune of having our system installed at a Tier 2 operator, which was then acquired by a larger company. And now we handle the volumes of both companies combined.

Over the years, I’ve purposely over-engineered my systems to handle larger volumes than the customer initially anticipated. But mergers aren’t the only reason to over-engineer. Sometimes you don’t get the data because of problems with the network or the switch. And so, if you’re down for a few hours, you’ve got to catch up, but how do you catch up if you can’t process more than you’re sending?

Then there’s another issue most people try not to think about — and that’s hot hours. It’s a known fact that often about 17 percent of daily telecom traffic will actually come through in one hour. So to handle that volume and allow you to catch up, that’s how we design our systems.

But if you go to other suppliers you’re liable to end up buying two to three times as much equipment than originally proposed — “You need three times more disk“ or “Oh no, you need a bigger processor.” Many salesmen play that game because it’s their job to get the initial order. Well, I don’t play that game. Instead, I leave in some leeway: put in more processing power than I promise. And customers come back and say, “Gee, we’re now processing 50 million CDRs.“ And it’s at that time that I go back and say, “Guys, it’s now time to think about adding capacity because I only promised you 25 million. I’ve given you a lot of extra room, but now you need to consider something bigger.”

	I understand that for a time you were actually replaced at Williams.

Yes, a couple years into our work at WilTel, they told us we would be replaced by a solution from SOTAS (now out of business). SOTAS had absolutely beautiful marketing materials. And they made a lot of big promises. In fact, they were still developing their system when they put it in, but they promised it would be complete in a few months.

Now our systems were running in parallel for some time there. SOTAS actually upgraded twice during the implementation. And the amount of hardware they kept bringing in was crazy. We’re talking row upon row of servers, pre-processors, pre-post-processors, and all these things to get data to move through the system. They put in eleven 6-foot bays of equipment, promising WilTel that it would handle 25 million CDRs a day.

Well, it took ten months for them to decide to turn down our system. But after they did, it was only 6 months later that I got a sheepish call from our friends at WilTel saying, “Hey, Beck, how fast can you get a new system in here?“ It turns out WilTel spent over $2 million with SOTAS and the highest throughput they could achieve was 16 million CDRs. SOTAS was out the door when they asked for yet another $500,000 for more hardware. That request was the one that broke the camel’s back.

Now WilTel wanted us to deliver an entirely new system that could do 35 million CDRs a day. The day we rolled in that new system at WilTel was one I’ll always remember. My team and I from Beck were there to install the system that was shipped to WilTel in two big boxes. Inside were two bays of equipment, including a SAN with lots of disk on it, two fully clustered systems, and ancillary parts such as fiber switches for communicating with the disk, etc.

But when the shipment arrived, the WilTel folks said, “Hey wait a minute, Gary, you only have two boxes here. That can’t be enough.“ And I said, “No, that’s the whole system.” And they said, “Gary, you know we’re going to do extensive regression testing to ensure this can absolutely handle the volumes.“ Well, I assured them that we had delivered a system that did as we promised. And it was at this point that they walked me back to their data center — that was the first time I saw the massive eleven bays of SOTAS equipment.

WilTel tested our system extensively over the next two days and discovered it could process 60 million CDRs.

So there’s a simple lesson here. Salesmen will promise the moon just to get the deal. But it’s not the salesman’s job to deliver. Well, guess what. My company is going to deliver because it’s got my damn name on it. And it’s more than pride in what we do; I’m a small company. I can’t afford not to deliver what I promise.

	That’s a great success story, Gary. And please tell us about your technology. How are you able to pack all that processing power in a small footprint?

The simplest way to describe our technology, Dan, is to say we sell a black box. In that respect, we’re a lot like a cloud computing supplier because when you sign up for a SaaS or other cloud service, you don’t ask: is it running on Unix or a Mainframe? That’s not important. The only thing you worry about is performance — are you getting what you paid for?

Well, unfortunately, the real-time requirements of our fraud system mean we can’t rely on a relational database like everyone else. So we built our own memory models that store, manage and mediate the data internally. Our entire data structure — memory as well as disk — was designed around doing one thing: processing vast amounts of data very quickly and optimized for our technology on top.

	But this computer merely sits in a corner and nobody in the IT shop even maintains it. What you need to do is post a big sign on the rack saying, “Black box application running here. Do Not Disturb.“

Exactly, but you’d be surprised how long it takes customers to come around to that way of thinking. They hardly know the system is there. Even when a disk dies, we ship them a new disk and they swap it in at no cost to them.

Remember these are extremely highly available, multi-clustered systems. You could almost take an axe to the back of it and it would still run. System A’s uptime is measured in years and the redundant system B is capable of processing the full load. So if either system completely fails, the other takes over.

	But how many CLECs or other small carriers really need this power?

Well, we can scale the solution up or down. It’s not one-size-fits-all.

I have a small wireless ISP customer in Texas. They run something like 100,000 call detail records a day — not a lot. But they were being hit by $10,000 a day in fraud, so that’s why they are on our system. It’s very small. They have one guy who checks the system a couple times a day. Well, that customer doesn’t need a big computer, so that’s why we’re hosting them. They are paying about $1,500 a month to be hosted on my system. That’s it. Plus, they never have to do anything special, just log in and FTP us their CDR files.

So we are flexible in the way we deliver the solution. Another big customer is running about 14 million CDRs and that’s fully hosted in my data center too. But I also have a customer in the UK running about 20 million CDRs and they have their own system.

	OK, we’ve covered your hardware technology. What about the software side of your fraud management system?

Dan, we do things differently in a number of areas, such as in-system-mediation and our customizable user interface, all designed to simplify the investigator’s job, but let me cover the two most important ones.

In our fraud system, for every line of telecom service, we create a three dimensional model of that line’s traffic automatically. And the beauty of this is you don’t have to set up the system and say: “Anybody who calls X number of times gets an alarm.“ Almost everyone designs their fraud system with thresholds like that, but when you think about it, it’s impractical because you’ll have customers who call a thousand times a day and others who call 10 times a day.

As I said, with us, every single phone number and phone line is profiled. That’s our unique Fingerprint Signature Profile. And by the way, that requires more computing power than other methods because we update the 3D profile constantly to keep it statistically current. And if you have tens of millions of lines in service, we do that for every line.

For example, we may find out that you typically make X number of calls during certain hours of the day and those call are X minutes long. Then the next time we see traffic, we compare that new call to see if it fits the pattern.

Now for a new customer, we tell them to send us up to 90 days worth of back data. And we will pre-process and run that data through to create the memory model. In that way, the day our fraud system is turned on, you’ve already got the memory models for every line of service. Interestingly enough, every time we‘ve first turned on our system for a customer (with their data) the demo was stopped because they immediately found fraud.

	In addition to your automated method for finding fraud, how does the fraud investigator insert new rules into the system?

Well, we allow the fraud investigator to create alarms and more rules in their system to alarm any combination of call data, destination, times, etc. We also create watch points, or simplified rules that you can implement fast without a lot of fuss.

Now with this design our systems generates more alarms than anybody, so I’m sure the next question you’re going to ask me is: “So how do you keep people from being inundated with alarms?“ That’s where our Automatic Intelligent Feedback and the way we roll alarms up to the line of service level comes in. Bottom line, the system learns and minimizes the work load of the investigator.

As we accumulate alarms up to the LOS level, the number of alarms contributes to the priority of those listed LOS’s. And as that rolls up, the phone numbers with the highest numbers, the highest valued lines, worst countries, most minutes, most international calls, and all the other rules — those are the ones at the top of the list. So as you work from the top down, within minutes you’ve handled everything that’s going to hurt you. In other words, we create such a tight net that we can identify exactly what the investigator should be looking at.

Another important feature I’ll highlight and it has to do with a customer’s traffic changes. In this lousy economy of ours, companies have been reducing the amount of outbound calls they make. Ah, but this would allow somebody to get in there and start using a company’s traffic and you would never detect the increase for a long time. So to combat that threat, our system calculates for attenuation. It will compensate for the lowering levels of traffic automatically.

Finally, the intelligence we’ve put into the system has allowed operators to run fraud management with far fewer people. In the WilTel days, fraud staffs at carriers were typically anywhere between 10 and 20 people. Today, even large operators need only 4 or 5 fraud investigators to run our system; small operators can get by with only one.

	Gary, this is great stuff. One final question: what’s the biggest challenge the fraud investigators — the people who use your system — worry about these days?

To be honest, the biggest problem they face is getting steady funding for their fraud department. Once they stop the fraud, after a while management says, “We don’t have any fraud. Why am I spending this kind of money on staffing if I don’t have fraud?“

To combat that misunderstanding, (besides management reports) we coined an analogy that our customers find useful when trying to convince management, and here it is: Fraud is a wind that always blows. If you put up a wall, you won’t feel the wind. But as soon as you take down that wall, it’s going to blow you over.

I remember one time the wind blew pretty fierce at one company. Due to a reduction in force, they had to reduce their staffing from 8 to 2 fraud investigators. Shortly thereafter, the company lost $2.2 million in fraud. The system even noted the events, but nobody took action on it because there was too much to do. In the end, they brought back half the team.

So remember that: Fraud is the wind that always blows.

This article first appeared in Billing and OSS World.

Gary Beck

Gary Beck is the founder and president of Long Beach, CA-based Beck Computer Systems, a company that sells telecom fraud systems that integrate across hardware and software.

Beck Computer Systems, Inc. (BCS) is a privately-owned computer and network solutions organization founded in 1983. Contact Gary via

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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.

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