Express lines to telecom service: Carriers look to portals for that elusive value-add

Telecommunications, Dec, 2001 by Ted McKenna

"The ultimate goal of flow-through provisioning is that you receive an order from your customer and it flows automatically through the system and no human has to touch it. Ideally it happens right away," Goldman says. "But nearly all requests for service require something physical to happen in the network. With DSL, for example, even if the line is qualified, somebody has to physically connect that line through a splitter and give DSLAM access to it."

So request for DSL service may as well be made by telephone, since the customer and service provider will probably need to talk on the phone anyway, if only to schedule the technician's visit, according to Goldman. DSL service providers do, however, typically let potential customers determine whether DSL service is available to them by typing in the phone number. BellSouth, among others, also lets customers order service online. Data indicating a particular customer is eligible for service can sometimes be wrong, BellSouth's Small concedes, in which case human intervention in the process becomes necessary.

Thus, when it comes to service fulfillment, many service providers are focused on developing internal rather than external portals for use by customer service representatives, salespeople, technicians and others, Goldman says. Iowa Telecom, which operates local exchanges formerly owned by GTE, recently installed an order management application from Fuegotech that lets the company automate much of the order processing for new long-distance carriers. Iowa Telecom's staff, not the customer, uses the Web-based interface to handle the order.

"You pick the things that hurt the most and probably happen the most," says Iowa Telecom CIO Brian Naaden. "It's the worst that we want to remove first, and then we'll move into other kinds of automation. Would it be kind of cool to have a Web page where customers could sign up for a long-distance plan? Yes. It's just not anything we have on our radar screen right now,"

Other companies building internal portals to track and automate orders include metropolitan optical networking provider Looking Glass Networks, which is using software from Kabira, among others, to configure, implement and manage services automatically. The carrier also implemented a portal using software from Cygent that lets customers manage aspects of their established service on their own.

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To see the future of telecom portals, look at NTT's DoCoMo service in Japan, Xacct's Uberoi says. Customers there pay for such value-added services as ring tones, which they download to their cell phones. Using third parties to provide such services, NTT gets more use out of its network as well as a cut of the services provided over it. Such advanced services will be key to paying for next-gen networks rolled out by carriers in Europe and the United States--the difference between profit and loss.

Suppose a customer wants short messaging service updates during the Wimbledon tennis tournament: Handling such requests makes sense for a provider only through a Web site, since each call center transaction can cost a service provider at least $5--more than the data service being ordered would deliver in revenue, according to Netonomy, provider of Web-based customer care software.