With several customers in Europe already under its belt, Netonomy Inc. is honing in on U.S. wireless carriers looking for a different way of providing customer service.
Instead of customer relationship management tools, Netonomy touts itself as a provider of “customer managed relations” software. The company said its goal is to surround customers with the things they care about, giving them direct access to back-end systems, while at the same time saving carriers money by cutting down on the number of live operators needed in their call centers.
“We’re providing all the data from various sources and consolidating that in our system and presenting it to customers so they can see the information and do something with it,” said John Hughes, co-founder and executive vice president of business development and marketing for Netonomy.
The company’s MyNetonomy software “talks” to a carrier’s business support system, rather than the operation support system, which then implements the applications on the network. Netonomy said it can do a full implementation of its software within three months.
Among other things, MyNetonomy enables customers to purchase handsets, switch from a prepaid to a postpaid calling plan, buy or remove value-added services, manage personal information and pay a wireless phone bill over the Internet or from an Internet-enabled phone.
Hughes believes that the upcoming launch of third-generation services in the United States, coupled with the increasingly younger and more technologically savvy mobile-phone user, will make a self-service oriented CRM tool more applicable going forward.
“In this new world, or wireless world, where value-added services are an important component, CRM call services are not enough,” said Hughes.
MyNetonomy is an alternative to traditional CRM plans. It has caught on particularly well in Europe because 3G services already are a reality and more Europeans use mobile phones than the Internet. Hughes said in Europe there were more prospects with many customers that were more likely to use a wireless device to augment their account.
“We’re not trying to say in the 2G world that we’re complementary,” said Hughes.
Netonomy’s customers abroad include Bouygues Telecom, Vodafone and Telecom Italia, reaching approximately 30 million wireless subscribers in both business-to-business and business-to-residential markets. Hughes said the company hopes to contract with a U.S. wireless carrier by the end of the year.
Most recently, Netonomy entered an agreement with Nuance Communications Inc. to co-market MyNetonomy with Nuance’s speech recognition software.
Privately held, Netonomy has dual headquarters in Boston and Paris, with sales offices in San Francisco, London, Madrid, Rotterdam and Stockholm. It has 85 employees and was founded in 1999.
