Tempe, AZ — March 26, 2003 — Two providers this week rolled out solutions targeted at the telecommunications industry, with ChannelWave and E.piphany debuting new applications for this sector.
ChannelWave, a provider of partner relationship management (PRM) software, introduced an extended, industry-specific solution developed to address the unique marketing, sales and operational challenges faced by service providers in managing dynamic, multi-tiered selling relationships with agents and other partners.
The solution, ChannelWave for Telecommunications, is a Web-based, operating platform intended to help carriers and master agents increase sales revenues and profitability by optimizing channel operations, improving channel visibility and supporting multiple tiers of agents and partners. The solution can be deployed onsite or hosted, and customers can purchase the software under perpetual license or subscription, a program intended to support the needs of carriers of varying sizes.
The provider said that it has extended its solutions to support telecommunications channel best practices, including program management, joint marketing, lead management, team selling and commissioning, as well as back-office integration for secure agent access to order, billing, pricing, contract and customer service information through a self-service portal.
The new solution is designed to give carriers greater visibility into master agent and subagent performance, end-customer demand, sales forecasts, commissions and other essential information needed to effectively manage an indirect sales organization. As a result, carriers and agent partners should be able to manage all account activity, from program registration to commission payments in real time, through a single dashboard.
ChannelWave already works with such telecoms companies as AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Covad Communications, Qwest and Verizon.
E.piphany Launches Interaction Advisor for Telecommunications
Meanwhile, customer relationship management (CRM) specialist E.piphany released its E.piphany Interaction Advisor for Telecommunications, a new solution that was designed to combine contextual and historical customer data from across the enterprise to help turn inbound customer interactions into opportunities that improve customer retention and increase cross-sell revenue.
The provider said the solution was designed for today's telecommunications organizations and includes pre-packaged data models, business processes and campaign templates reflecting industry best practices. E.piphany said the solution could be implemented in a matter of weeks.
As E.piphany sees it, a hyper-competitive business climate and poor service quality have caused telecommunications companies to suffer from soaring customer churn, high customer acquisition costs and lower profit per customer. Based on customer acquisition costs alone, churn costs the telecommunications industry tens of billions of dollars annually, the provider says. In addition, many telecommunications companies are seeking to cross-sell products to increase customer share-of-wallet.
Interaction Advisor works across multiple channels in a coordinated fashion and is particularly geared for the contact center, Web-self service and mobile devices. The solution blends information about real-time behavior from telephone calls, Web interactions and mobile device interactions together with customer demographics, transactional data and other information from across the enterprise. Guided by strategies set by the marketing user, the system combines this data with online analytic technologies to calculate offer acceptance probabilities, allowing the software to select and present the best offer for each individual customer.
As customers accept and decline offers, the self-learning analytics continuously adjust predictive models to improve customer interactions without human intervention.
"The impact of customer defections on the telecommunications industry is enormous," said Phil Fernandez, executive vice president of products and marketing at E.piphany. "Our experience with more than a dozen wireless, wireline and diversified providers in the telecommunications industry enables us to help companies combat falling revenues by taking advantage of the 'golden moment' when customers can be influenced, the moment when a customer has chosen to interact with the company."
E.piphany Interaction Advisor for Telecommunications is available immediately and can be purchased as an individual solution or in combination with other elements of the E.piphany E.6 CRM software suite.
