Primal Systems Inc., a provider of customer management products, introduced a new product to its suite of e-business solutions, called WebCare, last week at Billing ’99 in Dallas.
Designed to help carriers maximize the use of the Internet for customer-care functions, WebCare allows customers and resellers to do provisioning and self customer care via the Internet. The product also provides for Internet billing and electronic bill presentation and payment.
The billing industry is beginning to focus on the Internet as a platform for providing customer care and billing. Mark Nielsen, president and chief executive officer of Avery Communications Inc., which has agreed to purchase Primal, said there is a learning curve for customers using the Internet for paying their bills.
“When banks first introduced ATMs, it took a while for people to become comfortable doing cash transactions over a machine rather than going into the bank and using a teller,” said Nielsen. “I think we’re seeing the same thing with Internet billing-that there is some reluctance on the part of consumers to use it initially-but we’re seeing more and more uptake on the Internet with people beginning to shop on the Internet and becoming comfortable with making various transactions over the Internet.
“There’s a time lag in which cultural changes have to be made for consumers to be comfortable with it,” he said.
Nielsen predicted a trend of significant uptake in Internet billing and payment during the next year to 18 months. Internet service providers initially will be most successful at getting customers to pay online because of their customers’ familiarity with the Internet, and plain old telephone service customers probably will take the longest to make the transition, said Nielsen.
“Given the number of people already on the Internet, it’s not unrealistic to expect that within a year’s time of a carrier introducing it, particularly on the wireless side, that 10 percent of customers will be comfortable with using Internet billing,” he said.
Nielsen said WebCare is unique because it also can be accessed using a Palm Pilot device to do provisioning or send messages to pagers or wireless phones via the Internet.
Primal also announced a partnership with Group 1 Software, a database marketing software provider. The partnership calls for Group 1’s data quality and data mining tools to be integrated with Primal’s Outfront decision support system.
Primal’s decision support system is billing system neutral and is designed specifically for the telecommunications market. Because the system is independent of any particular billing system, carriers can get an enterprise-wide view of their customer base, said Nielsen.
Decision support systems allow carriers to use historical data to determine the value of a particular customer. The systems also help carriers proactively handle customer problems before they get out of control.
“The biggest concern for churn is high-value customers,” said Nielsen. “If I lose one high-value customer, that could be like losing 10 normal customers.
“If a customer has a problem, if I wait for them to call me, nine out of 10 times they’re not going to call me, they’re just going to switch services,” he said.
