Advantage Incumbents: IP is Built on Trust (cont'd)

Be Willing to Fix the Details
LTC is on its third IP telephony supplier. With each we have faced significant problems with implementation, number management, and on-site support. Making our fax lines work has often been beyond their technical capabilities. One of the underlying reasons for these hassles may be that they have no repeatable cutover process or project plan. Each time we listen to a sales pitch, we end up asking questions the sales person cannot answer well. As operations specialists, we've told them specifically how we can help solve their problems, introducing them to processes, policies, key performance indicators, cutover plans, even on-site support.

In every instance, the sales people leapt on our offer and said “we need that.” When we would speak with product managers, however, their attitude was negative. They'd say that they had everything they needed. The truth came and went with our cutover deadlines and showed that the salespeople were right.

Slap-dash approaches to cutover planning, provisioning, and on-site support will not stand up to mainstream demands. In LTC's case, we happen to have the skills to do most of our service configuration ourselves and talk through the remaining issues with the provider's team. The broadest numbers of target customers - where the real money will be made – cannot and will not accept service chaos from any provider – competitor or incumbent.

Incumbents Have Work to Do
It is easy to forget that the incumbents' ordering, provisioning, maintenance and billing processes took decades to achieve the level of reliability customers have come to expect. Even the best of the incumbents is still working to deliver IP telephony services with the same level of quality and reliability with which they provide telephony on circuit networks. Incumbent telcos have their work cut out for them in carrying their reliability over into the IP world.

Telcos today are focusing on eliminating the issues surrounding provisioning and managing VoIP networks, but they are just getting started. Most don't yet offer web sites with the self-management tools many consumers expect. Web-initiated queries and orders don't typically “flow” all the way to activation. The linkages between new applications and legacy data have not been made yet. Incumbents still suffer problems in their residential broadband networks where users are left without connectivity for days at a time. Incumbents, however, believe in and pay attention to process, policy and continuous improvement. They will find and fix failures much more quickly than competitive carriers who think they have novel ideas when they say that processes “stifle creativity and innovation.”

Incumbents' customers have faith in them, which gives them perhaps the greatest advantage for winning in IP. People know that every time they pick up their handsets, there will be dial tone. This trust, which is largely taken for granted, is the single biggest obstacle for any company competing with the incumbents. As long as the incumbents move rapidly to underpin their VoIP offerings with the same service capabilities and quality as the switched network, they will hold off most comers. VoIP may be new and bleeding edge, but when it comes to customers and who they trust, 100 years of experience matters.

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