Wireless Operators Anticipate LNP Confusion

Unable to ignore the Wireless Local Number Portability (LNP) mandate any longer, mobile operators are confronting the demands of the November 24 deadline. Time is no longer on their side, so operators have shifted into high gear to update their network infrastructure, interconnect with service bureau clearinghouses and train their customer care and sales staffs.

“We are planning for a high level of transactions from day one,” says John Gasson, senior director of IT at Nextel. As the lead for Nextel’s LNP program, Gasson is responsible for interpreting the FCC guidelines and disseminating Nextel’s strategy, as well as project updates and changes across multiple business units. For Nextel, customer satisfaction is the central theme of its LNP program.

Nextel and Verizon Wireless have approached LNP proactively. Verizon Wireless declared that it would not charge fleeing customers one-time fees for their service change requests. And Nextel has signed an operational agreement with Sprint that will facilitate the port switching process. Their competitors, on the other hand, have chosen negative campaigns designed to dissuade subscribers from requesting a service change.

In a September press release, Cingular describes the port request process as fraught with errors and delays and warned customers that they may not be able to receive incoming calls for hours during the time span after the service request is made and until the port change is finalized. While disconcerting, this presumption is highly probable. Studies from Convergys, TMNG and others reveal a gaping rift between customer expectations of LNP and reality.

According to a Convergys survey of 3,000 households, the majority of respondents expect the service change to occur on the same day as the request and with only one call to the provider. This view aligns with the FCC’s guideline of 2 1/2 hours to complete a wireless-to-wireless port change, but customers who want to switch from wireline service to wireless service will face much longer delays. The FCC’s suggested timeframe for wireline to wireless port changes is four days.

Readying the Staff and Systems

If the numbers reported by TMNG are correct, kiosks, retail centers and customer call centers will receive an onslaught of service change requests after LNP officially kicks in. More than 8.7 million wireless customers are expected to seek new service the day after November 24, predicts the consulting firm.

On the business front, TMNG reports that 24 percent of large companies with more than 500 employees say they are ready to change operators when LNP takes effect. As well, 33 percent of the businesses that use multiple operators may take the opportunity to consolidate their corporate wireless accounts by moving to one provider.

With that many change requests, Convergys expects call centers will receive up to 50 million calls within a month after the deadline. To prepare for the flood of requests, mobile operators have contracted with clearinghouses to streamline the switchover process. Service bureaus TSI and NeuStar will route the change requests and port information between operators, activate the number at the Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) and broadcast the new routing information out to the network.

The back-end process for exchanging ports between carriers is automated, says Linda Hermansen, vice president of business development and strategy at TSI. “Most carriers have built a gateway that interfaces to us. They can send records from the billing and customer care system or provisioning systems to the service bureau through these interfaces. We have worked closely with the operators to test the gateways and platforms to make sure the interfaces work.”

A few smaller operators may resort to faxing requests, but Hermansen says the vast majority has automated the porting process.

TSI and NeuStar have worked overtime to connect the mobile operators to their clearinghouses and to NPAC to ensure that the port exchanges are automated and streamlined. Even if these back-end processes are seamless, the critical, customer-facing front-end process could derail thousands of requests.

In late September, sales personnel at kiosks and retail centers in the San Francisco Bay Area showed a fair knowledge and understanding of LNP. One representative from AT&T Wireless said that nothing had been decided yet, so he didn’t have any answers. Representatives of Nextel and T-Mobile warned that LNP might not be available on November 24, but it would be offered by the end of the year. They explained the process as a simple credit check, signing a new contract and purchasing a handset. They did promise that service would be instantly available.

When asked about training timeframes, Gasson says Nextel is training the sales channels, support staff, repair technicians and fallout centers. “Some folks will be saturated three weeks prior to the deadline. For others, we will schedule a knowledge transfer six weeks before the deadline.”

At Leap Wireless, Laurie Itkin, director of government affairs, admits that it will be difficult to train the staff. Leap’s plan is to funnel all requests to a dedicated LNP team. “The biggest challenge will be for the customers and retail representatives to know if a customer is eligible for LNP,” she says.

Even with the challenges to effectively train the staff, the misinformation is alarming, especially given customer expectations.

“Customers expect to walk in, request service and walk out with a new phone and new service. Realistically, number portability will have a 3-hour to 6-hour delay depending on whether the port is from wireline to wireless or wireless to wireless,” says Hermansen.

The delay could be even longer due to the change request’s circuitous route. Here’s a snapshot of a change request’s trip. When a customer makes a change request at a kiosk or during a call to a customer support center, the staff must first check the number’s eligibility. If the number is eligible for porting, the request is forwarded to the clearinghouse, which in turn transfers it to the subscriber’s current service provider. If the provider can identify the customer and has no reason to block the request, the port information is messaged to the clearinghouse, which then activates the subscriber’s service by broadcasting the new routing information through the network. This broadcast activates the new subscriber’s service, as well as the billing system, which will begin collecting CDRs.

That scenario describes a successful port change request. Realistically, what should be a straightforward process will be complicated and error prone. “We are expecting 50 percent of requests to fail on the first attempt,” says Rick Findlay, director of wireless industry solutions at Convergys. “On the second attempt, 75 percent of requests will succeed.”

Weak Points in the Game Plan

The fallout pitfalls of LNP are practically endless. To start off, only subscribers in the top 100 Metropolitan Service Areas are eligible. Technically, requests from ineligible customers aren’t fallout, but they will contribute to overall dissatisfaction if not handled properly by the sales staff.

Handset incompatibility and network particulars are other non-system, non-technical reasons that could prevent a customer from switching service. Most subscribers don’t know the type of network that is compatible with their handset. But for a customer to move from a GSM network to CDMA, or vice versa, they will need a new handset. For customers switching services with the goal of saving money, the expense of the added handset could be a deal breaker. To sweeten the deal for those customers, some operators are considering offering a free handset.

More tedious—but manageable—is fallout due to inconsistent customer information, such as a wrong address, different form of name, incorrect social security numbers or misspellings. Customers may include information on their LNP applications that doesn’t sync with the original information they provided their current provider when they signed up for service. Operators expect that these issues will be handled at the fallout centers without customer intervention.

“If we are porting a customer and can’t get a valid address, the change will be delayed until we can get a valid address,” says Leap’s Itkin.

Existing contracts, a major sticking issue among operators, are sure to frustrate customers. “The operators are debating right now if a subscriber can be held back from porting if they have an existing contract,” says Findlay.

Requests that involve existing contracts could fall out because the original provider will stop the process. The original provider could say it can’t release the port because the customer is still under contract. The original provider is not allowed to contact the customer, instead the new provider must call the customer and ask them to contact his or her original provider.

Debra Stipe, senior manager for OSS Solutions and Alliances for Telecom Media Networks, an industry practice of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, expects that the customer’s call will initiate a bidding war between the two providers as they wrangle over termination and service fees. “Customers will have carriers offering to pay their contracts and cancellation fees,” she says. These struggles may ultimately benefit the customers, but the delay and back and forth will certainly lead to more customer frustration.

Fallout can also occur after porting takes place. A switch or database may not have the most updated information, or the new provider may not be able to unlock the number in a CDMA handset. These network errors will delay the subscriber’s service and lead to additional dissatisfaction.

The clearinghouse environment is another potential site for fallout. TSI and NeuStar are doing everything possible to make the porting process error-free, but the different data fields in the operators’ billing systems have caused some difficulties. For the exchange to be successful, all the data fields must be aligned system to system.

“One of the biggest issues has been deciding validation fields among trading partners,” says Hermansen. “Some operators want to validate records as cheaply as possible. They want to use phone numbers, state numbers and ZIP codes. Other operators’ billing systems may require social security numbers.”

TSI has had significant problems getting operators to share their criteria. If the information is not available, warns Hermansen, the port request will not be successful. “We can do some data transformation but fundamentally we cannot add data. If we don’t know a social security number, we can’t add it.”

TSI and CTIA have urged operators to fill out operational agreements, which outline field and system criteria, but the operators have been hesitant. Nextel and Sprint were the first to sign an agreement and to date have the only operational agreement.

“The agreements outline how to exchange port requests, validation rules and special considerations between carriers,” says Nextel’s Gasson.

For TSI, the agreements ensure a better port switch success rate. “If we cannot get this level of detail, there will be a higher fallout,” says Hermansen.

Based on TSI’s pricing model, which is a per-transaction fee, the company has a vested interest in increasing volume and making the port moves error free.

Handling Fallout

With fallout sure to occur, operators have set up support centers, both internal and external, to follow the fallout trail and find a resolution. Nextel is outsourcing its fallout operations to Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. Leap is handling fallouts internally. (For more on Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s fallout operations center, see “CGE&Y Center Addresses Wireless LNP Fallout”).

“The fallout center takes the incident report and works to identify what the issue is and clean it up as quickly as possible,” says Nextel’s Gasson.

At TSI, operators and fallout centers can open a trouble ticket if a request has not been fulfilled by a certain time. In many cases, says Hermansen, a delayed order will trigger the system, which will open a trouble ticket automatically.

Convergys support staff will work with the service providers, NPAC, TSI and NeuStar to resolve the port error. “The problem could be anywhere in the chain. We will have Level 1 and Level 2 technical support staff to work with the customers and the various people in the value chain.”

Leap intends to channel all requests and trouble tickets through a dedicated LNP staff.

Even with the support of fallout centers, operators will have a difficult time meeting the 2 1/2 hour timeframe set by the FCC. “Making the changeover in 2 1/2 hours is possible but not probable,” says CGEY’s Stipe. “In reality, [customers] could be waiting one or two days.”

Errors, NPAC unavailability and broadcast message delays could contribute to making the port changeover much longer than the proposed 2 1/2 hours.

In cases where customers can’t walk out of a retail center with new service, operators are considering delivering the new phone overnight once the port change is successful. Rural operators, says Stipe, may request customers to return to the store so they can maintain a more personal relationship with the new subscriber.

Other reasons that customers will most likely be disappointed are that they could face other unexpected fees. Some LECs have said they intend to charge intra-LATA toll rates for calls to numbers ported to wireless carriers in other rate centers. These ongoing fees will not be readily apparent to callers and could cause sticker shock when the bill arrives.

Operators may also attach fees to recover LNP costs. Sprint, AT&T Wireless, Nextel and Cingular are already charging up to $2 for E-911, pooling and portability. Subscribers could be hit with additional porting charges along with thousand-block number pooling charges, which allows for the disbursement of numbering resources to service providers in thousand-number parcels. Again, these different fees are not order fallout, but they could add to the feelings of distrust many customers already have for their service providers.

History Lessons Learned

When discussing the challenges surrounding LNP, it takes only a short jog down memory lane to recall the disasters CLECs faced when they launched services or when LNP was activated. Order fallout became a major source of contention between the RBOCs and CLECs.

Even with the similarities, Nextel’s Gasson says mobile operators have learned a number of lessons that will help them streamline the LNP process.