Fitting the Bill: Can One Size Fit All?

Cable World, May 15, 2000 by Karen Brown

When it comes to adding high-growth voice, Internet and data into the mix with video services, MSOs are looking for the back office management system that literally fits the bill.

That isn't easy -- although systems are now available from a handful of vendors that can ride herd on a subscriber's various service accounts, issues of coordination and policy still abound. Changes on the horizon promise to further alter how MSOs do business with their subscribers.

It definitely isn't like the early days of cable, where operators concentrated on a single video product.

"Five to seven years ago, it was a one-size-fits-all solution," said Curt Champion, director-cable broadband for Convergys Corp., a major supplier of billing service platforms to MSOs including Cox Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. MediaOne Group, Insight Communications and Time Warner Cable Inc. "It assumed everyone worked like everyone else."

Today, MSOs in various stages of new service rollouts need more control over the back office, including options on how to issue bills, billing cycles, and how to make service changes. That has actually weeded the billing management field, leaving only a handful of companies, Champion said.

Convergys has kept in the billing game with a number of new products, including its Integrated Communications Operations Management System (ICOMS) platform. ICOMS knits together individual services to produce a single customer account summary and if, the operator chooses, a single bill. For the cable operator, the system provides a complete profile of the subscriber, down to the rates, tax charges, services and account activity.

Single view

"One thing that is clear -- what our customers want is a single view of their customer," said George Vonderhaar, president-utilities and broadband group for Convergys. "That way they have the ability to value their customer so they can cross-sell, cross-promote between services."

Managing and tracking the "touch points" -- the places subscribers can contact the cabler about service issues -- is also a pressing topic these days, said Bob McKenzie, SVP-strategic marketing for DST Innovis, another billing system supplier that counts Excite@Home, Road Runner and a raft of cablers among its customers. DST, Innovis' parent company, is preparing to launch a version of its AWD software used in the financial industry for cable services. The AWD system provides not only tracking for customer contacts, but creates a work flow to follow progress on individual billing requests such as new service or repairs. That allows cable companies to coordinate billing into operations and technical support.

"The interesting thing with this is it interacts not only with our system -- the customer care management -- but with other enterprise systems," McKenzie.

The market may require complex systems, but that hasn't stopped new vendors from venturing into the space. Take Ceon Corp., for example. Ceon has been in the billing service market since 1982, but it recently reaimed itself as a coordinated billing provider for cable companies, according to CEO Tim Fritzley.

Ceon's suite of customer service and billing products features call center, Internet and interactive TV points of access for cable customers. The company gets at billing coordination providing an umbrella billing system that acts as a catalog for the separate programs. That software includes links that funnel requests to the proper billing system, Fritzley said.

Consolidated billing

When it comes to a consolidated bill for services, it isn't necessarily an easy sell. Up until now, the market has waffled, plagued with concerns that customers would suffer sticker shock when they saw a combined bill. So Convergys developed its Flexible Statement product, which lets the operator offer subscribers choices.

The customer can choose to put one set of services on one bill and break out others to separate bills for tracking purposes. Fritzley

"What it leads into is giving the customer the decision as to how they are to be serviced," Champion said. "It's really going to be the communication and the relationship to customers and their feeling of empowerment that's going to determine who wins in this (telecommunications) market."

There are practical snarls to consolidated billing. McKenzie said it isn't so much the idea but "the operational ramifications in doing it."

For example, there is the problem of dealing with the customer who pays only part of a bundled service bill. Questions arise as to which service gets credit for what portion of that payment, and which service is targeted for shutoff first for lack of payment.

One solution is to assign a priority ranking system to the services. That, in turn, can cause internal political strife with service divisions wanting their fair share of the pot, so DTS Innovis' system handles this by parting up the money among the services, McKenzie said.

Future trends

Even as services keep pace with present needs, there is also the future to consider. The rapid proliferation of services MSOs are offering, ranging from video-on-demand to telephony, is leading to a heavy volume environment where "the trend is definitely toward transaction, transaction transaction," Convergys' Champion said.