Put your competition in check - Company Operations

Communications News, May, 2001

Propelled into a changing market, an ICP responds with a quick move.

As vice president of management information systems at Lightship Telecom, a N.H.-based integrated communications provider (ICP), Nick Zeitvogel knows just how competitive the CLEC market in New England is. Each time a new ICP enters the market, it aggressively sells promotional rates and discounts designed to lure customers away from other carriers. For example, a new ICP enters the market with a long-distance calling plan. If the incumbent ICPs cannot meet or beat that plan quickly, they could lose enough customers to significantly impact revenue.

Soon after Lightship's inauguration, with its operations centered in Bedford, Zeitvogel and his staff realized they needed a system that allowed them to be more nimble in reacting to market demands while aggressively expanding. The ICP currently serves business customers in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts, with plans to extend services this year to customers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Zeitvogel's mission is to deploy technology that allows Lightship to enter those new markets easily, and to adjust quickly to competition and changing market demands. "We needed something that could manage a wide variety of products, with the flexibility to easily launch new products and promotions," he says. Lightship's legacy system made those crucial tasks cumbersome.

"Every time we needed to build new products into the system or debut multiple product promotions, we needed a programmer to painstakingly write and change the code within the system," Zeitvogel says. "That could take months. In this market, you don't have months to react. If we don't have the billing infrastructure in place to usher in new products and services at a moment's notice, we won't even be able to compete."

Lightship needed a convergent billing system, one that could add new services easily, change existing services and initiate new promotions, such as cross-product discounting. With its choice of ADC's Saville CBP--a convergent billing platform with customer care--Lightship can generate one easy-to-read bill for a variety of services and deliver customer service that prevents the number of disconnects. That is an important combination for Lightship: finding an integrated broadband communications provider that offers midsize business customers like it a variety of services including: frame relay; voice and data services; local, regional and long-distance phone service; e-mail; Web hosting; conference calling; and digital virtual private networks.

IN SEARCH OF A SOLUTION

To gain a time-to-market advantage and retain its customers, Lightship deployed ADC's CBP, and, since then, has sponsored new multiple product promotions and implemented new rating plans in days rather than months, enabling it to react swiftly to the evolving competitive landscape.

"All we need to do is add data to a table, and we can reconfigure our product offering without time-consuming and costly custom coding," Zeitvogel says. "Now, those responsible for introducing new products can do so faster and easier." Quickly deploying cross-product discounting programs helps Lightship entice customers to buy new services.

CUSTOMIZED TO CUSTOMER

The solution's integrated customer-care capabilities help Lightship build customer loyalty. It links customer information to back-office data systems, so that service representatives can view a customer's entire history and deliver individualized care each time a customer calls for service. "Now we can track customers and their usage by market, product and time frame," offers Zeitvogel. "We have a better handle on who our customers are and what they're doing. We're able to put much more information into our service representatives' hands, so they can deliver the necessary care to keep our customers happy."

Lightship deployed CBP through a service bureau format, producing bills in 90 days, rather than the six-month time frame required to deploy other billing systems. The solution's flexibility allows Lightship to send bills to its customers on a monthly or quarterly basis, depending on customers' wishes. Lightship can also accommodate the plethora of varying tax rates within each geographic region. The service bureau option saves Lightship from paying upfront capital expenses for the equipment, staff and facilities to deploy a system in-house.

"CBP gives us a competitive edge. Now, when we enter a new market, we can immediately deploy new products and promotions that will help us solidify our customer base from the outset," Zeitvogel adds.

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