Competitive local exchange carrier, New Horizon Communications, is dedicated to providing exceptional account management and customer service to small and medium-sized business customers nationwide. It provides customers with a multi-carrier platform and a customer interface to real-time repair, provisioning, billing and order management system, a key differentiator in the marketplace. Hundreds of services from 22 major carriers are conveniently aggregated onto one bill and fully supported by NHC.
In order to achieve its profitability goals by product, customer and sales agent, a service provider needs a great deal of information delivered rapidly on how its operating costs and revenues are performing. This is what allows NHC to negotiate effectively with its underlying carriers, run an efficient operation and reward its sales force accordingly.
The business issues are threefold. First, carriers provide billing information on a multitude of services in a variety of formats that need to be reconciled to New Horizon’s contractual rates. Second, the compensation of NHC’s sales agents must be closely calibrated to profitability as well as sales volume. Finally, if an underlying carrier has a new product or service, NHC is committed to providing it quickly to its customers.
New Horizon needed help as it sought to drive profits on the tight margins of a competitive service provider business in which it is buying services from multiple wholesale providers under negotiated rates and selling highly customized multi-carrier services to its business customers.
Carriers may have great relationships with their wholesale partners, but billing problems are inevitable. It was important to NHC to make sure that what they have been billed for by their carrier partners is accurate and that they are consequentially billing their customers for everything they should be. Making sure each carrier bill is accurate is not a job that can easily be done, but failing to do it jeopardizes profits.
The Vertek Solution
Leveraging Vertek’s resources and expertise in a broad range of related fields such as order management, business assurance, data integrity, network migration, quality assurance, and process, Vertek’s Financial Assurance (VFA) service provides a complete end-to-end perspective. This managed service enables NHC to understand where the key break points are in expenses, revenues and margins of their customers and products.
NHC uses VFA across all of its carrier partners. The managed service solution addresses NHC’s issues at a low, fixed monthly recurring fee, without capital, personnel or integration expenses.
VFA is a managed business assurance solution that utilizes state-of-the-art analytical tools specifically engineered to acquire, validate and reconcile the accuracy of communications service providers’ monthly operating costs and billing. It removes the considerable time and resources required to administer and process vendor invoicing and charges internally, and gives NHC access to actionable intelligence affecting its financial performance. VFA is able to find the source of discrepancies that cause unnecessary costs, record fallout, pervasive data integrity issues, missing accounts and uncollected revenues. In addition, VFA automates existing business rules and highlights upstream issues that can be addressed to enable on-going improvements and efficiencies.
