Back Office - Less Haste, More Speed

Posted 10/2000

Back Office

Less Haste, More Speed
DSL PROVIDERS WORKING ON CURES FOR ORDERING HEADACHES
By Chris Garifo

With demand for DSL soaring, carriers are becoming telecommunications versions of Top Gun pilots: They feel the need for speed.

One of the areas becoming ever more critical in requiring a dramatic upgrade in speed is in the ordering, qualification and provisioning process. Over the past few months, solutions have been introduced and strategic partnerships developed to address those specific needs.

Mike Lowe, a senior industry analyst for Cahners In-Stat Group (www.instat.com) in Scottsdale, Ariz., says the DSL industry is seeing subscriber growth of 50 percent from quarter to quarter. Cahners In-Stat is forecasting an installed base of 72 million lines worldwide by 2004.

But to meet those projections, ordering and provisioning problems need to be addressed. Improving the DSL ordering and provisioning process is "absolutely critical," Lowe says. "If there were no other broadband options available, it would still be critical because we're still at the phase as an industry of convincing a large amount of people that broadband is something that they need--as opposed to dialup, for instance."

Vectris Telecom Inc. (www.vectris.com), a Texas-based DSL startup offering service in Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma, has taken a multitiered approach to reduce the time and frustration that has so often been part of the consumer DSL ordering process. According to Joe Samples, Vectris' vice president of information services, Vectris gathers all of the parameters needed for a DSL order up front in the sales cycle and then triangulates on what the customer can be provided, not only through Vectris' pre qualification routine but also by going directly to the local exchange carrier and checking the customer's distance from the central office.

DataZen Corp. (www.datazen.com) offers a prequalification product similar to what Samples describes. The vendor's ServiceFinder enables service providers to offer websites where a customer can request service and automatically get a response to see whether service can be made available to that specific customer.

"We have developed an algorithm that works from the CO, and it traverses the street network to create a polygon that is a certain distance away from the central office," says DataZen president and CEO Michael Keeler. ServiceFinder considers the most likely route that a customer's traffic would take on the network, the length of that route and other information. This enables it to ensure that the user is both within range of a CO for DSL and that adequate network resources, such as available DSLAM ports, are available for that user, he says.

Karna Gupta, chief marketing officer for software supplier Eftia OSS Solutions Inc. (www.eftia.com), says a lot of DSL providers are trying to customize order management products for DSL. In many cases, the DSL-specific solutions will include the capability for the end user to find out on the website whether service is available for that specific area. Eftia's Master.DSL solution offers just such a web interface that allows for customer self-ordering. Software supplier NightFire Software Inc. (www.nightfire.com), meanwhile, operates BandwidthExpress.com, which in addition to allowing a customer to check on DSL availability, also allows the customer to track the order's status and ask support questions.

DataZen's Keeler says preprovisioning is key since 70 percent of orders that come in from customers--whether through web orders, salespeople or whatever--fall through the cracks due to order entry/order management problems. The order may be kicked back from the ILEC, the customer may be outside the carrier's footprint, or there may be an impediment in the form of a line quality or distance problem.

"We focus on upstream process of qualifying the prequalifying customer so when marcom gets pointed at a particular prospect that prospect has been qualified by the carrier," he says.

Once the customer's distance from the CO is determined, Vectris uses Turnstone Systems Inc. (www.turnstone.com) Copper CrossConnect CX100 for its loop qualification. Samples says Vectris won't send a truck out until the customer's order has gone through all three of those phases. As a result, Samples says, Vectris has reduced to an average of 1.2 the number of truck rolls per customer to get its service turned up. The industry standard is about three truck rolls.

Vectris sells its DSL through ISPs and is seeking distribution partners who will use Vectris Management Gateway, a web-based customer service platform based on Cygent Inc.'s (www.cygent.com) eBusiness support system.

Vectris was formed in October of 1999 and it found very few options available when it began looking for a customer interface, Samples says.

"If you look at the market in about December [1999], the only two directions you had to go from a telecommunications customer experience were either with some adaptation of your customer relationship management [CRM] systems, some adaptation of your billing or your big legacy network inventory systems, or a Cygent," Samples says. "There just wasn't a lot of competition in a telecom vertical for a kind of e-commerce front end for your customers."

Since then, however, the market has changed rapidly.

In April, Covad Communications Co. (www.covad.com) partnered with SmartAge.com Corp. (www.smartage.com) and Netopia Inc. (www.netopia.com) to launch the SmartAge DSL Center, which provides businesses with information about DSL, lets them find out if DSL is available in their area and order Covad DSL service and Netopia DSL Internet equipment through Covad's and Netopia's ISPs.

Covad has also speeded up service by utilizing a fully automated loop ordering process, which it initially deployed with Pacific Bell (www.pacbell.com) in December of 1999. The process, which uses NightFire's SupplierExpress software, lets Covad completely automate the handling of all transactions with each phone company, including the flow of the order from the ISP through Covad's OSS. The automated process cuts processing costs, reduces the chance for error and prevents installation delays, problems that were the bane of the manual process that DSL providers have been using for loop order.

Jerry Rudisin, CEO and president of NightFire, says that while SupplierExpress automates the entire behind-the-scenes DSL ordering process, resulting in up to a 70 percent reduction in fees and a cut in delivery time, it is still essential to have skilled employees. And there is a lack of trained people in this arena.

Eric Moyer, director of product marketing for Covad, says when the company initially launched its TeleSpeed service in the San Francisco Bay area in December of 1998, it didn't have much of a pool of experienced DSL people to draw from.

"We built the capabilities to train them and learned what it takes to do DSL installation," Moyer says. "So, when we bring new people on, we'll put them through a fairly intensive training program to bring them up to speed about what it does take to do DSL installation."

Moyer says that Covad, by starting out from the beginning as a DSL provider, had a distinct advantage over carriers who want to add DSL to their current product portfolio. Such carriers, he says, have back office systems that "aren't set up to process orders for DSL and that probably aren't even set up to talk to each other." That means the carriers "have to make changes in [the systems] that allow them to deploy DSL, which can be fairly complicated and take a lot of time to do," Moyer adds.

Those carriers have the option of trying to develop the systems themselves, or turning to solutions providers.

NightFire's Rudisin says that his company's biggest competitors are those homegrown solutions or manual processes that providers use when they're still very small. In those instances, Rudisin says, a prospective customer will call an ISP, for instance, and talk to a customer service representative, who will take down the required information. Then, about once a week, the ISP will send a spreadsheet with all the information to its DSL provider. In other cases, the customer rep might take down the information and then use its provider's website to enter the information.

Such a DSL ordering process is inherently slow and fraught with inaccuracies that can--and frequently do--cause even further delays. Cygent, Eftia and NightFire have begun offering a variety of solutions designed to bring greater automation to the ordering and provisioning process.

Covad, for instance, by using NightFire's solution, has a process that Moyer says is fully automated.

According to Moyer, Covad generally sells its service through channel partners who then sell DSL bundled with Internet access and other types of services to their subscriber base. Covad's automated provisioning interface, called Crosslink, allows the ISPs to completely integrate their systems with Covad's, so that orders flow seamlessly from the ISPs, through Covad and then out to the ILEC systems.

"The goal is to basically have the first time that a human touches the order be when our technician shows up at the end-user's house to do the installation," Moyer says.

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