Another added feature for the ISP-CLECs on the business side in light of a business portal vs personal-portal like I described in last post is what Teligent and FocalPoint have going.
The only thing a towering paper stack of local call detail records (CDRs)
is good for, some businesspeople argue, is keeping the fire lit on a cold
winter night. With paper invoices, there's no quick and easy way for
telecom users to extract and analyze calling patterns and cost information
themselves, unless someone takes the time to rekey it into a spreadsheet
form each month.
As telecom competition heats up, competitive local exchange carriers
(CLECs), as well as incumbents, must focus on personalized,
value-added services to attract and retain customers. "One thing the
industry needs to talk about is 'blocking and tackling,'" Robert Waldman,
managing director at New York-based Salomon Smith Barney, said at
the Association for Local Telecommunications Services (ALTS) annual
convention. What Waldman was referring to is the marketing plans and
back-office applications that nimble CLECs should be developing to
differentiate themselves in the marketplace.
Many telecom companies are tackling the issue of cumbersome paper
invoices by offering bills in electronic format, such as on disk or
CD-ROM. But when it comes down to serious blocking and tackling,
CLECs such as Chicago-based Focal Communications Corp. and
Vienna, Va.-based Teligent have joined the ranks of the NFL.
These companies are pushing the envelope aside for web-based invoice
delivery and, in Teligent's case, the ability to pay via the Internet. In
essence, the CLECs are giving customers the ability to control and
manipulate their billing information to see how effectively they're spending
their telecom budget.
In early November, Focal launched its Invoice Domain offering for
customers nationwide. Invoice Domain, a website with individual
password protection, was created by Focal's Information Services (IS)
department during the course of two months, says Len Dedo, Focal's
senior vice president of marketing.
On the Focal website, customers have access to their invoice summary
(see graphic below). In addition, they can see charts of phone usage by
band, day, hour and number; account balance information; data on local,
international, and intra- and interstate long distance calls; taxes and
surcharges; and line charge and local usage detail records. Most
importantly, according to customers, is the ability to download data
straight from the website.
Chart: Invoice Summary
"It's extremely easy to download our records and import data into Excel
spreadsheets," says Jon Peabody, chief information officer of Rock Island
Securities Inc., a Chicago-based stock brokerage. Rock Island began
using Focal's local telecom services in July. At the same time, Peabody
was seeking a way to obtain Rock Island's call records electronically
because he wanted to analyze the number and duration of calls to its
dial-up Internet service. Focal provided that information, and Rock Island
became one of the beta testers for Invoice Domain in late summer.
So far, Peabody has been extremely pleased. "Unless we have the
primary data, we can't evaluate the efficiency of our communication
dollars," Peabody says. "If it's just a bill online, it's not useful."
This is an important fact of web-based commerce, analysts say. "You
don't want to stop with just bill presentation [on the web]," says Bill
Whyman, an Internet strategist with the Precursor Group, the
Washington-based research arm of investment firm Legg, Mason, Wood,
Walker Inc. "Once you've generated a bill, you have to generate the
commodity around it." Downloadable data and the ability to pay online
are just a few of the ways to make sites more useful.
The Focal site is still evolving, according to the company. Currently, the
invoices are put online only at the end of the monthly billing cycle. And
customers still have to put stamps on envelopes to remit their payments.
"Our customers are large businesses on the high end of the market,"
Dedo says. "Point-and-click payment is not what they're looking for." But
as Focal moves into the small and medium-sized business market, Dedo
expects the company to explore the possibility of payment via the
Internet.
Teligent, though, already has jumped wholeheartedly into all aspects of
e-commerce for its small and medium-sized customers using "e.magine,"
its new web-based billing system. With e.magine, customers will be able
to order services online, download real-time data on service usage and
pay the bill (see graphic below), all from an Internet browser. Because
account information is updated on a real-time basis, customers don't have
to wait for a bill to arrive each month to keep an eye on their phone usage
patterns. Information that can be downloaded includes account code,
length of call and originating and terminating numbers.
More info and charts> x-changemag.com
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