Customer care has become an increasingly important tool for operators competing in the wireless market, says a Swedish company that recently launched its third-generation customer care product in the United States in conjunction with InfoCellular Inc.
When wireless carriers in Scandinavian countries began to experience high penetration rates in 1993, they recognized the need for customer retention and looked for ways to improve customer care, said Orjan Grinndal, marketing manager for Abalon AB.
“Carriers have been subsidizing phones to get new customers. They really want to make sure [customers] don’t change their carrier after the limited time. Companies here in 1993 started focusing on how to keep the customer, and we came in with a very interesting project,” said Grinndal.
In 1994 Abalon provided its flagship offering, called Abalon Customer Care for Telecom, to Swedish operator Telia Mobitel AB.
The solution provides one central database to automate common customer-related activities throughout a sales cycle.
“Most carriers today have information from billing packages,” said Grinndal. Their systems “are much more focused on hard facts such as addresses and payments. That’s not really customer care. We’re talking about all information.”
The system helps customer care representatives answer questions ranging from coverage areas and roaming areas to how to set up voice mail and use subscriber identity module cards. Information about customers is kept on the database which includes information such as what carrier the customer previously used and logs of previous complaints, questions and problems.
If a customer calls requesting help with voicemail and the representative sees that the same person called the day before with the same problem, he can send the customer a brochure on how to use voicemail, said Grinndal. “They have the knowledge of actual [network] problems. You could actually shorten a problem call from two minutes to 30 seconds, and the person calling actually got feedback.”
The product also allows carriers to conduct telemarketing, customer surveys and marketing campaigns using the single database. The payoff from the system, says Abalon, includes shorter sales cycles, higher sales success rates, higher levels of recurring sales and lower costs of problem resolution.
Additional customers for Abalon Customer Care include Denmark’s Sonofone, Eircell in Ireland and Ericsson Cellular in New Zealand.
Last year, Abalon was purchased by Astea International, a company based in Philadelphia that provides field service applications. Astea’s presence in the United States should help the company enter the market as well as solve the problem of distribution, said Grinndal. Teaming up with InfoCellular of Wayland, Mass., which is offering the solution along with its customer acquisition products, will give the company a stronger foothold in the U.S., said Grinndal. InfoCellular’s current customers include big-name carriers such as Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile, GTE Mobilnet and Sprint Spectrum L.P.
The emphasis on customer care in the United States already is growing quickly as carriers are finding ways other than pricing and coverage to compete in the marketplace. With the onslaught of personal communications services providers, that need is expected to become even greater. Abalon believes its advantage comes from the product it has been perfecting for nearly four years and its experience providing similar systems in other industries.
