Amdocs has announced two products aimed at enabling service providers to support their business customers better – to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. The two solutions – Amdocs Enterprise Customer Management and Enterprise Service Fulfillment – complement Amdocs’ existing enterprise charging and billing offering to address the requirements of enterprise customers.
Amdocs Enterprise Customer Management solution allows enterprise customers to self-manage their accounts. Amdocs said that the benefits for service providers are that self-management could reduce average call handling time; increase first-call resolution; cut support costs and field service visits; and provide real-time SLA monitoring and alert notification to reduce penalties and improve customer satisfaction.
Amdocs said that its Enterprise Service Fulfillment solution integrates the ordering and fulfillment processes by utilising the Amdocs enterprise product catalogue to reduce time to market and delivery lead times for complex enterprise services (e.g. multi-site VPN); automates service fulfillment including the ability to amend orders ‘in-flight’ without interrupting the process; significantly reduces the failure rates common to complex orders; and introduces Amdocs Universal Activator to converge, automate and vastly simplify network configuration across all lines of businesses and media types.
Both solutions support complex business customer hierarchies and vertical industry offerings, offer scalability for high numbers of users and process volumes, and enable service providers to meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs). The new enterprise solutions are part of Amdocs’ CES portfolio, and are designed for convergence to support both enterprise and residential customers on a single, integrated system.
“With consumer revenues flattening, service providers are focusing on the enterprise segment to accelerate their business and financial growth,” said Dan Colquhoun, Senior Vice President of Customer Research, Frost & Sullivan. “Success will require the deployment of new solutions like those introduced by Amdocs in order to fulfill complex services and differentiate customer service as observed in a recent survey which identified key gaps between business customers’ expectations and the services they receive.”
The survey, conducted by Frost & Sullivan, highlighted:
- 30 percent of enterprise customers reported that order fallout occurred “fairly often”, “very often” or “always”.
- Less than half (45 percent) of service providers have automated systems to keep track of their contractual commitments regarding order fallout.
- Dissatisfaction with customer service (59 percent) and technical support (57 percent), the inability to meet contract and SLA terms (57 percent) and recurring order process problems (52 percent), were cited as the major reasons for enterprise customer churn.
“To develop profitable, long-term relationships with enterprise customers, service providers must differentiate their customer experience and provide a service that is tailored to business customers’ needs,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, Amdocs vice president for product and solutions marketing.
“The new Amdocs enterprise solutions enable service providers to efficiently deliver a wider range of offerings to their enterprise customers with greater service quality and the ability to create tailored, vertical market offerings to targeted segments such as finance, education and healthcare customers.”
The survey results are based on qualitative surveys of director-level and above executives at 22 Tier-1 and Tier-2 service providers and 100 enterprise businesses across North America, Europe, Central and Latin America. The interviews were conducted from September to October 2011.