Customer Self-Care: Sharpening the Competitive Edge

Customer self-care technology is moving into the spotlight, not just for the money it can save service providers, as important as that is, but also because it can be an important tool in customer retention in an increasingly competitive environment.

The acquisition of Switchmaxx, a division of Phonetics LC, by CopperCom Inc., a provider of VoIP infrastructure, crystalizes the increasing importance of customer-care applications. “We are moving to a user-centric telecom world because of competition,” says Chuck Harris, vice president of marketing at CopperCom.

The effects of competition are starting to be felt more keenly, particularly in the IOC world, and service providers are looking for tools that can give them competitive advantages. In the past, “Whatever services they did have, they didn’t have to establish a brand because there was no competition,” says Joe McGarvey, principal analyst for carrier IP telephony at Current Analysis Inc., “but now the Vonages of the world and the cable guys are going into their turf. So they need both to have a brand, and they also need self-care capabilities that will allow their subscribers to do those things that Vonage [subscribers] can do to change services and preferences themselves.”

Self-care, such as activating new phones, has long been a feature in IP PBXs and IP Centrex services (of which consumer VoIP is merely a subset), but now finally is trickling down to consumer services on the perception that it is a competitive edge.

While the addition of Switchmaxx will not greatly expand CopperCom’s addressable market the way its host-remote capabilities did, says McGarvey, self-care capabilities may well tip the scales in a sale. “Service providers might be swayed by things like the self-care and Web portal capabilities, so there might be differences in selling one piece of hardware over another,” McGarvey says.

The applications developed by Switchmaxx have the added advantage of being focused, not just on self-care, but also on providing those capabilities across traditional and VoIP environments. Therefore, the software has applications that continue to work as service providers migrate from circuit-switched telephony to VoIP: Customers will continue to use the same portal with the same interface as the service is upgraded, the only difference being additional services.

The Switchmaxx applications are not about just managing features, such as call forwarding, on the Web. They allow customers to add and remove services, pay bills and monitor their accounts, all online. A customer can buy call waiting and have the feature active in 15 seconds. The provisioning is automatic, as are the links to other back-office systems, such as billing.

There is also the ability for the service provider to apply its business rules to the online self-care. If a customer has not paid a bill, there may be a hold on adding new services, but if the customer pays the bill, that hold can be removed automatically.

Of course, CopperCom isn’t the only vendor stepping up its customer-care solutions. MetaSwitch in March made an agreement with Rodopi Software Inc., a provider of IP operational support systems, to add automated provisioning to its Class 4/5 softswitch. Rodopi already provided billing features for the product.

VeriSign Inc. also enriched its offerings in this area with the January acquisition of CallVision, a software company based in Seattle. VeriSign plans to use the acquisition to deliver combined electronic bill presentation, payment and customer self-care applications, adding those applications to the VeriSign Commerce Suite. VeriSign is positioning the acquisition as providing customers with tools to improve customer satisfaction and reduce operational costs.

Clients such as Bell Canada, T-Mobile USA Inc. and TelstraClear use CallVision applications to consolidate billing data from multiple systems, products, geographies, languages and currencies into a single electronic bill payment view. It also can create one view of multiple accounts.

SupportSoft Inc. also has weighed in with new customer-care applications, this time for triple-play services, and offers a rich selection of communication tools to enable customer service representatives (CSRs) to address subscriber problems quickly.

The new SupportSoft Intelligent Assistance Suite (IAS) includes a multiperson chat tool to enable CSRs to handle multiple customers at once, increasing productivity, says Marc Itzkowitz, director of product management.

IAS also enables CSRs to push automated resolution information to customers and can record the communication between CSRs and end users for quality assurance, training or for end-user’s records. The Intelligent Issue Routing feature of IAS forwards subscribers to the correct CSR or channel (meaning a CSR, Web portal, or whatever) based on available information.