Intec's integrated customer management and billing solution provides a single view of all your customer information.

by Jeff Goldman [July 12, 2006]

Intec was founded in 1997, and went public in 2000. The company is headquartered in the U.K., with 1,700 employees worldwide, and it reaches a diverse market. "Intec has a very broad BSS/OSS suite for telecom, and it's branching out into some other verticals besides just communications," says company spokesperson Rosemary Mount.

And virtually everything in Intec's product portfolio, Mount says, is a fit for ISPs. "An ISP can use just about every solution that we have, out of the box—everything from mediation to retail billing to dynamic charging to content partner management—because their business models are becoming more and more complex," she says.

Intec (404) 705-2800 info@intecbilling.com

Singl.eView, Intec's convergent billing solution, is the foundation upon which the company's range of functionality is built. "It's really a suite of components that make up a broad set of capabilities around retail billing and customer care," says Jack Storer, Intec's Director of Business Solutions.

Benefits of integration
As a pre-integrated solution, Storer says, Intec covers all the bases. "It provides not only the inbound customer care or trouble ticketing, but a full suite of business support for managing prospects who haven't become customers yet, turning those prospects into an order, taking the order, feeding that through into billing, and activating the networks with the services," he says.

As part of that suite, Intec's customer management and trouble ticketing functionality is thoroughly integrated with the billing solution. "We've been very successful at helping our customers understand the real value of having a pre-integrated customer management solution that, out of the box, links to billing, and shares a single database and a single view of the customer data," he says.

Among other things, Storer says, that can save an ISP a lot of money. "The Patricia Seybold Group says that for CRM packages, the cost of the package itself represents about one seventh of the cost of integration—so if you're looking at a large customer management solution, that would indicate that you could expect seven times your license price in integration costs," he says.

That proportion, Storer says, is something that Intec has seen in its own installations. "Sometimes we have some larger customers that choose a third party customer management solution, and the integration efforts are not trivial," he says. "They're significant—they take a lot of time and a lot of resources."

Customized pricing
The smallest ISP for which Intec's solutions would be appropriate, Storer says, would be somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 subscribers, depending on the types of services they're offering. "The beauty of the application is that, when we do scale down, it's the same application—and it can scale up to serve some of the larger Tier 1 providers that we have across the globe," he says.

Storer says all pricing is flexible—it's generally negotiated individually for each customer, and can be based on the number of subscribers, billed revenue, or any other factor. "We work with the customer to figure out what's an important metric to their organization, something we can measure value against, and then we base it on that," he says.

Depending on the size of the installation, Storer says Intec's professional services team will spend anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks working with the customer to determine their requirements, then helping to configure the business rules within the application. The team will also help with any downstream integration with third party applications if needed.

A rules-based solution
Beyond the pre-integration, Storer says Intec's real strength is that it's a flexible, rules-based solution. "All the business rules can be dynamically configured, and because there's no pre-built assumption about what market or industry you're in, you don't have any limitations," he says. "For example, you don't have just a wireline rating system—you have a generic transaction rating system that can rate for any types of transactions you need."

And because you're manipulating business rules rather than code, Storer says, the system can easily be configured by non-programmers. "The time to market is quicker, and it drives through a better return on the investment in terms of what you can deliver out of the box, what you can get up and running quickly, and how you can effectively manage it going forward," he says.

Included in that functionality, Storer says, is the ability to create screen pops based on any of a number of different triggers. "We can configure triggers behind the scenes that can recognize candidates as they call in, and pop up screens for the service reps that allow them to take the customers through a pre-arranged dialogue to see if they're interested in additional services," he says.

A single trouble ticket can be tracked through phone, web, and e-mail contacts. "No matter what the source of the customer interaction, we can track it," Storer says. "So if someone calls in, the rep's going to see that they also had some e-mail dialogue, some Web-based dialogue, or something else."

Ultimately, Storer says, it's easy to pin down what makes Intec stand out in the marketplace. "There's really no one else out there that has the pre-integration to billing—sharing the same database, sharing the same customer information—so you have that 360-degree view of the customer, no matter what they're doing," he says. "And the other thing is the flexibility of the rules-based system—it's not code-based; you don't have to pay a whole boatload of programmers to go in and change the business rules—they're highly configurable using an administrative user interface."

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	[April 16, 2004]	Beating the Branded ISPs
	[Sept. 10, 1999]	Keeping Customers: Part 1—Quality of Service

Online resources:
	Trouble Ticketing Systems Directory
	Quick Reference Chart