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"Waterstone's experience in the Utilities industry helped us identify the challenges we were facing, and apply newer technologies to our advantage." - President

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This company is a fast-growing reseller of long-distance telephone service. In this fast-paced industry, margins are slim and volume is king. The company's customer service and billing systems, however, were not keeping pace with the explosive growth of the company.
Executive Summary

Business Strategy

To compete in this aggressive market, the company empowers sales representatives to "strike a deal" to get new customers. Sales reps also needed the ability to offer new products and services, in order to keep those customers.

Additionally, the problems with an external billing service, including lost in-voices, unbilled customers, and lack of visibility to customer account status were becoming costly.

The company chose Waterstone Consulting to develop its core system. "These guys are polished," said the company's Director of Operations. "They helped us understand how to a attack our business problems, and then did it."

Technology Strategy

Waterstone Consulting developed and implemented a Technology Strategy that would support the business:

• Flexible pricing plans to support an empowered sales force
• Immediate updates for new products and services
• Seamless interface to the provisioning and billing systems
• Proactive and responsive customer service

Microsoft Visual Basic provides the flexibility to quickly add new services, and to easily modify rate plans, thus supporting "just about any deal the sale rep can dream up," according to the Director of Operations.

Project Success

The company's customer service system lets the company keep pace with their talented salespeople. And with support for proactive monitoring of service quality and calling card fraud, pulling customers away from them will be a challenge for any carrier.

Waterstone Consulting has helped this company's operations to keep pace with its own growth in a dynamic and fast-paced industry.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Industry: Telecommunications	Benefit: Flexibility for salespeople to negotiate rate plans Faster collections Integrated external billing Proactive customer service
Solution: Customer Service, Billing, and Provisioning system	Technology: Windows NT Microsoft SQL Server Visual Basic Telephony API (TAPI)