GCI: Trailblazing Market Leader
GCI is the market leader in Alaska, providing multiple telecommunication services to its customers, from local and long distance to Internet and multi-channel TV services. It has blazed a trail for other operators to follow by consolidating its back-office systems to support convergence, a trail that leads to not only supporting customers with the best possible service but one that positions GCI for future growth.
Achieving True Convergence
Telecommunication service providers today offer more services than ever before, making convergence an increasingly hot topic in the marketplace. To deliver all of these offerings in a seamless fashion, operators must make it easy for customers to access the services they want -- when they want them.
To achieve the goal of true convergence with one view of the customer, industry analysts say that operators must tackle the daunting task of consolidating multiple billing, customer care and order management systems. Analysts agree that it is only by consolidating these multiple back-office systems that operators can diminish their internal silos and differentiate themselves with a bundled convergent offering and high-quality customer experience. In doing so, they can also operate more cost-effectively and efficiently.
Streamlining Systems for Maximum Efficiency
A key to GCI’s success is effectively bundling and cross-selling its services to improve customer retention, drive revenues and reduce customer acquisition costs.
Its bundling strategy has produced impressive results: Today, the lion’s share of GCI’s customers use two or more services from the company, contributing significantly to overall GCI revenues. As a result of bundling, GCI enjoys lower churn rates that decrease even further among customers using more GCI services.
But like many other convergent service providers, as GCI’s business had grown, so too had the number of disparate systems supporting it. In order to continue to execute its bundling strategy and grow, GCI needed to focus on streamlining internal systems to drive efficiencies, reduce costs and position the company for future growth. GCI also sought to help its own call center staff better support GCI customers with a unified view of its customers’ accounts and services, which also would enable up-sell opportunities.
To accomplish these goals, GCI launched an aggressive initiative called OneView, which consolidated more than 40 systems, including multiple legacy billing, orders, customer care, and other OSS-related systems into a single framework of enterprise-grade solutions.
GCI’s motive for OneView was to make its back-office infrastructure the key enabler of the company’s growth strategy, providing the flexibility the business would need as it evolved.
Utilizing the Comverse Kenan® FX Framework
GCI selected solutions within the Kenan® FX framework to provide a single, integrated system to support orders, customer care and billing across its local and long distance, wireless and Internet services. In addition to selecting proven solutions, GCI also employed the expertise of Comverse’s Professional Services team to ensure a smooth implementation of a complex consolidation project:
- Comverse’s Professional Services team worked closely with GCI and other partners to migrate data from four billing and numerous other systems onto the Kenan FX suite, including the Kenan® BP billing engine and its Customer Center front end, Orders Modules and Kenan®Data Mediation.
- Comverse’s Orders Modules enable pre-integrated order entry, order fulfillment, and inventory management capabilities that work seamlessly with Kenan BP. With the Orders Modules, GCI can better manage customer requests from the point of request acquisition through service activation to billing.