Light Reading’s The New IP concept is focused on technology that powers better financials and agility. Management of technology is a big part of seeing that vision realized. In a new video interview, Order Management Driving The New IP, Heavy Reading Principal Analyst Ari Banerjee says the ability to automate and ensure order management is critical to all aspects of new services.
I completely agree with Ari’s view that order management is key to customer experience, time to revenue and operational costs. Service providers are telling us this is a huge pain point with their existing voice solutions (whether built in-house or white labeled). Ari notes that it’s a “fundamental linchpin to any service” as an order traverses many touchpoints and systems before a subscriber can consume a service and the service provider starts taking in new revenue.
Ari cites research where only 6% of survey respondents said they are happy with their order management systems. SIX PERCENT! We’ve also heard nightmare scenarios. Such as one MSO telling us that approximately 30% of orders are being rejected due to some type of error (e.g., mismatch in 911 and customer provided address), and finding out days or even weeks after the order was placed. This means a delay until the service provider can start collecting revenue, an irritated customer, and higher costs as staff must repeat tasks and possibly re-roll that truck. We’ve also been told about local number porting taking weeks to go from request to final installation.
Our Cloud Voice Platform addresses these very issues. Simplifying management is one of the core tenants of our product strategy and it’s an area we put significant development and focus on. Our horizontally integrated platform plus integration with Level 3’s network (both of which result in end-to-end flow-through provisioning) combined with our ease of management approach means we help operators on these points. Ease of management means the entire platform can be managed via our web-based portal or leveraging our API to plug into existing back-office systems. We take a business versus technology-centric view to VoIP management. The focus is on signing up and caring for customers, not CLIs and configuring boxes. We built the solution from the ground up as a cohesive system, minimizing touchpoints and enabling integration with third-party networks and systems to remove swivel chair and manual batch processes.
Our ease of management approach in the Cloud Voice Platform helps streamline operations, automate processes and reduce error when it comes to VoIP. In fact, our management approach is a huge contributor to the reduced TCO we offer to providers with existing VoIP solutions. We recently helped cable provider Vyve Broadband (read here: VoIP 2.0 in the Cloud – Vyve’s View) with some of these exact issues. Our partnership and integration with GLDS that we announced earlier this year is another proof point.
In addition to transforming the business model for VoIP, we believe that service providers are also demanding a radical shift in how VoIP is ordered and managed through the customer’s lifecycle. Light Reading’s The New IP philosophy is all about money. Making VoIP order management simple and intuitive helps providers better make money and save it.
Read more about making VoIP easy to manage in Alianza’s whitepaper: Service Provider Voice (R)evolution