Pipeline Publishing, Volume 6, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Managing the End-User Experience

Rationalizing Sales Management to
Improve Front-End Customer Experience

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once necessitated engineering, costing and ROI analysis can now be generated by executing business rules.

Up- and Cross-selling: Defining up-sell and cross-sell rules once, but allowing them to be automatically (and consistently) incorporated into all customer-facing systems.

Personalization / Customization: Easily creating distinct views, for example, personalized views for individuals, company branded views for re-sellers of the network providers services (e.g. a large MDU operator, who wishes to on-sell a cable company’s product under its own brand).

Flexible Product Configuration: Ability to have one product to be composed of another through a hierarchical relationship, and reuse of product elements.

Product Lifecycle Management: Ability to manage products and services from cradle to grave, including the use of predefined lifecycle states and transition rules defined through metadata, as well as version control.

Pricing and Taxation rules: Product catalog metadata is a natural repository for pricing rules, whether they are simple look-up rules or more complex formula-based pricing models (stepped, banded, formula etc.). Rules can be defined flexibly for dynamic enforcement of availability, eligibility, ranking, and validation; and can also access a 3rd party pricing engine.

Videotron Deployment

Canadian CSP Videotron’s experience deploying ConceptWave solutions is a case in point. With a growing base of more than 1.7 million subscribers, and in an increasingly competitive environment, Videotron—an integrated communication service provider—needed to improve its customer-facing ordering processes, CSR training time and cost structure. It also needed to decrease time-to-market for new products. The company’s goal: to transition CSRs from order takers into sellers by providing them with tools to interact with the company’s residential and business customers in more knowledgeable and engaging ways than before.

Prior to engaging ConceptWave, Videotron’s 1200 CSRs depended on Excel spreadsheets and Lotus Notes to explain and sell the company’s products. Without more automated and informative tools, Videotron’s customers were burdened with having to understand the many service options and choices available. CSRs used a mainframe-based ordering system, unable to clearly match their very specific needs with Videotron’s many service options, packages and promotions based upon location

Pre-Defined Functionality Speeds Deployment, Increases Consistency

as well as seasonality. As a result, CSRs were filling orders but not doing enough in the way of proactive selling to meet Videotron’s goals to support its quad play offerings.

In response, Videotron created a multi-phase project in which it engaged ConceptWave to provide a product-catalog based solution to meet its needs. ConceptWave built a productized API to the billing system to obtain product information. This new capability also supports new CSR functionality for cross- and up-selling.

In addition, Videotron product managers and marketing teams are able to access the same information as they create new offerings and products, and to progress them through a validation, testing, and approval phase that ensures there is no fallout following introduction.

Finally, in a system where revenue leakage was an issue in the past, a single source of product information created a location where over 1200 business rules could be added to ensure that manual order errors are eliminated.

Deployment at a Large North American Cable Operator

The benefits described above were realized by another large North American cable operator, which uses ConceptWave’s solution in its order-to-cash process.

Prior to engaging ConceptWave, this MSO faced a number of challenges. Software systems were cumbersome to modify and use, and there were different systems built for different channels, each of which supported a separate product set. This meant that customers who purchased through several channels left separate, unreconciled, data footprints. The operator was not able to obtain a “360 degree” view of a single customer: a single screen showing all products owned along with current status.

Product management for this MSO was also difficult: products were defined in flat files, which were imported into the various systems supporting sales channels. This meant that both changes to products as well as new product definition was slow and costly. Furthermore, there was no support for customer up-sell.

Using ConceptWave's platform, along with a SOA layer, this MSO has implemented an end-to-end order-to-cash solution that is

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