|
|
 Automated Customer Acquisition for
Local Exchange Carriers
Most sales activity for local exchange carriers involves marketing to
customers that already have local service with another provider. Economics
dictate the cost of customer acquisition, service ordering, provisioning,
and activation be minimized. The human errors that are prevalent in the
process must be kept to an absolute minimum. To achieve these goals, a
carrier needs to automate the customer acquisition process and the supply
chain to the greatest extent possible.
<see Xintex Whitepaper>
Product Code Catalog Management for Communication Carriers
In order to achieve supply chain automation, and ultimately to reduce the
manual effort required to provide communication service, carriers need to
deal with product catalogs from several different internal information
systems and several different trading partners. These catalogs contain codes
identifying all of the different services and features that are procured,
ordered, provisioned, and billed. The communications industry does not
adhere to a uniform product coding standard, and it is up to each
individual carrier to resolve the different definitions of product codes
that it exchanges between its internal systems and its trading partners.
This results in manually intensive and error prone trading partner
interaction, ordering, provisioning, and billing.
<see Xintex
Whitepaper>
Value Not Realized - OSS PREORDER - Questioning Conventional Wisdom
The Communications industry has been reeling from the recent economic
difficulties in the United States exacerbated by the events of September
11, 2001. Even before the 1996 Telecommunications act, CSP’s
(Communications Service Providers) were investing in communications
facilities of all kinds. Conventional wisdom stated that there was not
enough margin to gain an adequate return for
investors in any kind of resale scenario. Conventional wisdom dictated the
"land rush" that followed. Bolstered by very significant
investments, CSP’s rushed out to lay as much fiber as possible and ring as
many primary and secondary metropolitan services areas as possible. Communications
switches and routers couldn’t be built and delivered fast enough. The
reason was the same – gain as much market share as possible.
<see Xintex Whitepaper>
Competitive Carrier Strategies for Address Validation
Possibly the biggest bottleneck in the operations of Competitive Local
Exchange Carriers (CLECs) is the process of exchanging information with the
Local Exchange Carriers (LECs). A significant area of difficulty is address
validation. Address validation is required whenever a CLEC needs to order
services from a LEC. Valid addresses are required on a variety of documents
that CLECs need to provide to LECs. LECs will reject CLEC service requests
whenever a valid address is not provided. The problem is that a "valid
address" is an address as it is known to the LEC, and it is often
difficult to submit an address that will be accepted by a LEC without a
good deal of trial and error.
<See the Xintex Whitepaper>
|
