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 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>
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