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Tighter Integration
As bundled services gather steam -- consumers' adoption of them has trebled since 2004 -- the major challenge for providers has been to consolidate previously separate telephone, video or Internet access lines of business.
P. Andrew MacDowell, VP of IT and central support at $1.1-billion cable provider Insight Communications in Louisville, Ky., says tying bundled services into one billing system is vexing for any provider. "You bill differently for these services. You charge by minutes for telephone; you bill by subscription package for cable." Bundled services can strain systems' accuracy in charging for different packages and in integrating new products. In 2006, when Insight introduced VoIP to its markets in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio, MacDowell's IT team had to reconfigure the company's Convergys billing system to accommodate the rates and taxes for IP-based voice services.
For all telecoms -- but particularly for midmarket providers, which tend to have fewer resources -- bundled services make back-end system integration paramount. At midmarket cable provider Buckeye Cablevision, which has 150,000 subscribers, Shryock has wrestled with the limitations of the company's RR Enterprises Ltd. billing system. Making changes to customer accounts -- say, allowing an installer to add a cable modem to a customer's account from a BlackBerry -- is difficult because the billing software doesn't have an open application programming interface.
Instead of making account changes themselves, installers have to call in changes to the billing department, which slows down transaction times and invites errors. So Buckeye is shopping around for middleware to integrate its billing application with mobile devices. "It could be months, it could be years," Shryock says with frustration.
At SureWest, rolling out IP-based services would be a back-office nightmare without serious workflow automation. But tight integration between the company's homegrown Genesys customer relationship management (CRM) system and its activation and billing applications allows one system to pass an order to the next phase of activation. After Genesys receives an order from a call center or the Web, "our system turns on the various devices -- which fiber pairs need to be activated for bundled services, whether a voice[mail] box needs to be configured -- many companies do these steps manually," Dotson says. Seamless task handoffs minimize installation times and reduce the number of errors along the way. Dotson estimates that all this integration allows SureWest to save $1 million annually.
Consolidating billing systems is an ongoing project at $400 million General Communication Inc. (GCI) in Anchorage, Alaska. Until 2005, VP of IT Jim Dunlap used four billing applications to support GCI's quadruple play of offerings. Disparate systems couldn't consolidate charges on one bill, let alone evolve with new services. "Our goal was to get away from separate lines of business," says Dunlap, and adopt a model "that supported our bundling strategy."
In 2002, GCI's 110-person IT department embarked on a three-year project to consolidate all services onto one billing software platform: Comverse Inc. It was a mammoth effort that entailed building GCI's product catalog from scratch. And GCI isn't finished. So far, it has consolidated landline and wireless phone as well as Internet services on Comverse. GCI won't transfer its cable service, however, until 2008.
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