| As
a service provider your main concern is attracting and
retaining customers, which is a multi-faceted job. Not
only must you provide amazing, interesting, and
helpful services in order to draw customers in, you
must then maintain a relationship with them. Building
a long-lasting relationship that is valuable to both
parties, and profitable to you, is the obvious goal,
but how are you to go about attaining it?
The point at which the customer "touches" your
system is key in keeping the relationship strong, and
billing and service management are the meat of the
relationship. Billing must be efficient, service
provisioning must be quick and easy, and customer care
must be a 24/7 priority. While this may seem obvious,
finding a billing/management system to enable this
efficiently can be rough. An efficient billing system
keeps these things in mind while reducing
operating/overhead expenses, and leverages the
available features already in the system to set up
make your offering a holistic one.
Sentori is no stranger to the concept of billing
and management. They have provided integrated customer
management solutions including multi-service billing,
customer care, and service provisioning to
communications providers who offer voice, data, and
content services for the better part of the past ten
years. The company grew out of ASC (Alpha Software
Consulting) who provided billing and customer care
services to communications companies. The Sentori
product has been with the family since 1998, already
having been deployed in wireless, wire line, IP, and
satellite communications providers across the globe.
Sentori changed its name and approach in March of
this year, positioning itself not only as one of the
new guard in billing but also among the big boys of
the billing world. Concentrating on the converged
communications arena, Sentori has already made some
big deals with large providers, and has the system to
back up their amazing promises. The Sentori Billing
and Customer Care system features real-time,
multi-service rating and billing, customer care
solutions and flexible service provisioning through a
multi-tiered and Web-based technology platform --
positioning itself dead in the path of next-gen
service providers.
SERVICES ARE ONLY HALF THE BATTLE
Service providers must be key to offer all the hot
services available, but those hot services are even
harder to implement and bill for than they are to
identify. Sentori's system is customer-centric,
meaning that your customers will not only be provided
with a single bill for multiple services, they will
also have a single point of contact for customer care.
What that means to you is not only savings in
everything from paper for bills to customer-contact
staff, but also a simplified system that is
provisioned not only to combine and add up all the
numbers at the end of the month, but also provide
reports on what is making you money and what is
attracting customers -- key to creating effective
pricing strategies and service packages.
Ready For 3G Customer Needs?
With 3G coming up around the bend, effective rating
and management is essential. Sentori's solution offers
real-time and batch-rating that include reports on
time-of-day usage, duration of usage, volume,
transaction types, distance, and QoS, which allows
providers to rate not only the effectiveness of
service implementations, but also provide real
incentives for service packages, volume discounts, and
pricing plans. This not only increases profitability,
but also decreases customer churn by providing them
with attractive rate plans and services.
From integration to billing, the Sentori system is
comprised of individual software modules, each
dedicated to managing specific functions of the
overall billing and customer care process. This suite
of applications includes order fulfillment,
provisioning, data collection, rating, billing,
customer care, reporting, Web billing, and customer
self-care. Sound complex? The system is pure object
oriented and uses a three-tiered, Web-based
architecture that supports XML and WML -- keeping the
standard vehicles and familiar tools in mind to make
system management a low-cost, low-effort proposition.
Competition In The Billing Market
Sentori has already been the apple of many provider's
billing eye. One of their most recent partnerships was
with Siemens AB. Through Siemens, Sentori will
implement its customer management solution for
Bankvert's SIR project, which has been constructed for
all types of radio communication for railway
operators, stations, and other vendors including
voice, text, and data between mobile units as well as
between mobile units and fixed wire-line networks.
Others partnering with Sentori are Clarent,
Broadwing, Oracle, and Cisco Systems.
CUSTOMER VIGILANCE
Sentori believes that "people do business with people,"
and are therefore positioned to be watchful and alert
to the needs of clients so that your customers will
feel their needs are being met. By offering these
very-easy-to-implement software solutions to service
providers, Sentori can help you reap the returns on
all the new value-added services now available.
Mike von Wahlde welcomes questions, comments,
press releases, and news announcements at mvonwahlde@tmcnet.com.
[ Return
To The October 2001 Table Of Contents ] |
|
Even as more and more businesses are taking the plunge
and deploying IP-PBXs, there is still some trepidation
when it comes to making the choice to switch from
circuit to packet. In an effort to make at least part
of that decision a little bit easier, Alcatel has
announced the Alcatel Convergence Starter Kit, a
solution that they tout as providing medium to large
enterprises the ability to trial voice/data
convergence as they transition to a next-generation
approach to telecommunications infrastructure. The Kit
consists of one Alcatel OmniPCX 4400 IP-based PBX, one
OmniStack 6024 stackable LAN, four IP phones, four
digital phones, two in-building wireless phones, and
all the associated software.
The Alcatel Convergence Starter Kit also enables
some rather intriguing options, such as in-building
wireless capabilities for mobile workers and
soft-phone functionality for remote employees. The
soft-phone functionality is designed to allow
telecommuters and other remote workers to maintain a
professional appearance by providing all the
functionality that they would have if they were in an
office location. These features can include dial by
name, corporate directories, and unified messaging
applications tying together an employee's e-mail,
voice mail, and fax messages.
Currently available through Alcatel's North
American channel partners (until December 2001), the
Convergence Starter Kit is list priced at $19,995,
which includes the hardware, software, and one-day
installation.
Alcatel also recently announced that Jackson State
University (JSU) has chosen the OmniPCX 4400 to
provide VoIP services to the 1,200 faculty staff and
2,500 students on JSU's main campus and in three
remote sites across Jackson, MS.
JSU jumped at the opportunity to consolidate its
voice and data networks and to take advantage of
applications it could deploy with an all-IP voice
system and to better manage service and support issues
with its limited IT staff.
The VoIP network at JSU is currently being deployed
one building at a time. When the installation is
complete, there will be a total of 3,700 Alcatel IP
phones on the campus. JSU plans to eventually phase
out its existing Centrex service. Besides a $90,000
monthly bill, JSU felt that it was too time-consuming
to go through the service provider for simple requests
such as moves, adds, and changes. "By deploying the
Alcatel OmniPCX 4400, IT managers can easily manage
the voice traffic on a converged network and even
administer MAC for remote sites," said Dr. Willie
Brown, vice president for information technology,
Jackson State University.
Greg Galitzine welcomes questions and comments
at ggalitzine@tmcnet.com.
[ Return
To The October 2001 Table Of Contents ]
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