Most service providers bent on cost savings have been struggling over the years to reduce the number of truck rolls. Not ITS Telecommunications System Inc.. This Floridian IOC is trying to increase them.
With the help of Martin Group’s newly introduced Enhanced Services Platform, ITS is trying to turn every employee into a salesman and every customer contact into a sales opportunity.
“Our people are sensitive to the fact that we have competition and that our jobs and livelihoods depend on our getting our products into homes and that the more cross-selling we do, the more likely we will retain the customer,” said Jeff Leslie, president of ITS.
Approximately 3,400 of those homes in Indiantown, Fla., are ITS customers. ITS provides them with voice, broadband Internet and video through DIRECTV, but it wants to provide them with much more, such as “ITS Your Computer Guy” — the company version of the Geek Squad. It sells everything from power strips to inside wiring to maintenance agreements and uses Martin Group’s ESP to help define those products and services as well as provide the portals and back-office systems to get them activated and billed.
Martin Group refers to its ESP as IMS-in-a-Box for Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers. IMS has been perceived to be out of the reach, or even overkill, for smaller providers, so Martin Group has brought a lot of the IMS functionality into its ESP. The platform is a collection of software applications enabling rapid development and delivery of revenue-generating products and services. ESP is comprised of network and lifestyle applications, a Web self-care portal, a master product catalog and a product workbench.
“It uses a combination of legacy and next-generation software and allows our customers to manage the applications. We feel it’s a better approach for our customers,” said Dawn Hill, vice president of product management at Martin Group.
Part of that next-generation software comes from Martin Group’s acquisition of enhanced services software from CopperCom Acquisition Corp. in September. Martin Group said at the time it would leverage the acquired technology in combination with OASIS, Martin Group’s Operation Support System, and OMNIA, its business support system, as the foundation for an enhanced services platform. And so here it is.
