Business Transformation Through Simplified Products and Modernized Customer Service & Billing

The Client

This regional telecom company is a quad play market leader, offering cable, high speed internet, wireless mobile, and standard wireline services.

The Challenge

Our telecom client faced a host of challenges to its core business, including a proliferation of products, complicated and sometimes manual business processes, and an antiquated and unstable customer management and billing platform. The company’s product­-specific customer and billing system was not flexible to support new product and service offerings, nor was it able to provide customers with a simplified, single billing statement. Overall the company needed to simplify its business and modernize its core systems. To get there, the company decided to develop its own custom billing platform. When that project began to experience delivery problems, the company asked us to analyze the situation.

The Solution

We began by carefully evaluating the business strategy, development process, and system architecture for the platform development project. It was an ambitious endeavor for a company with little experience in large-­scale platform development. Through analysis and deep discussions with the Strong­-Bridge Envision team, the client decided to discontinue the effort in favor of a more tested billing platform already available off the shelf from a global third party solution provider. By doing so, the company could direct its budget and effort towards the implementation of that platform in a managed services model.

In partnership with the client, we helped select a billing and customer management platform vendor by guiding an RFP and contracting initiative. Key to this process was helping to identify a solution and a provider that could handle the scope of our client’s products and services, as well as the deep systems integration that would be necessary.

Once a provider was selected, we helped support the integration of the product through three major work streams: Project Management (PMO), which covered everything the company needed to coordinate and complete the initiative; Business Transformation, which defined simplified product offerings, business requirements, processes, and organizational change for a system update of this magnitude; and Architecture and Platforms— the most technical aspect, involving all steps required to build out the overall architecture of the solution, such as enterprise architectural process and integration.

A significant aspect of this initiative was systems integration, which covered the customer website, single sign on, payment gateway, POS, credit and collections, usage management, financials, and much more.

The Impact

Once the fully-capable, sophisticated, and reliable billing platform is in place, the company will be poised for significant financial savings, as well as greater platform stability and scalability. The new system will mean less downtime, faster time to market, and a better overall customer and frontline employee experience. In addition, continuous delivery capability on a fully virtualized and automated environment will allow changes to be moved into the solution much more quickly, and with much greater stability.