Acumen Solutions Makes e-commerce Easy-Commerce for RCN

The system features a number of customer-friendly features, including flexible shopping carts into which product choices can be dumped while consumers continue to shop, as well as the ability to schedule installations. But the interface with the billing system is the most strategically important for the customer who pays the bill and for RCN, which collects the revenue.

Naturally, making this happen was the toughest part of the job, said Konczal.

“Their existing billing vendor (Convergys, which declined to be interviewed for this article citing confidentiality agreements with its customers) does a wonderful job ... but the billing system isn’t necessarily designed for flexibility in promotions and packaging,” Konczal said.

To make the system strategic, though, RCN demanded the ability to change promotions and pricing, build and tear down bundles and just generally meet the competition on new features, services or even TV channels. That presented the challenge of having the billing system continue to support the existing product catalog, repackage the product information and re-present it in a way that is easy to consume on an e-commerce site.

The Sterling product catalog and information interfaces directly with the Convergys billing system, making sure the two work together and the e-commerce system gets the right information from the billing system to display on the Web site for the consumer making a purchasing decision.

“There’s a high level of customization throughout the flow,” said van Roten. “If customers choose phone, do they want to port their number, what phone features do they want? If they want to add HBO, Showtime ... international channels, it’s quite specific. At the same time, we cater to people who just know that they want mid-range-price cable plus Internet. We offer lots of choices and present them in a nice user experience to ease the buying process.”

Sterling’s solution eases the process between the purchase and the bill.

“Sterling, as an integration company, understands how to integrate its e-commerce capabilities with billing systems or ERP systems, etc., and designed its software to provide that integration,” Konczal said.

It also did it quickly, accomplishing the task within about 128 days so that RCN could hit the new year running with a differentiated e-commerce offering. The system is flexible enough that parts will be added or modified as the year progresses, but for now, it’s up and running and bringing RCN’s offers onto the computer screens of its potential customers.

Both Konczal and van Roten credit Acumen Solutions, a company that’s relatively new to the space, with putting together all the pieces and actually going out and finding Sterling and pointing the e-commerce expert in the right direction.

“Acumen [Solutions] is a premier partner of RCN in general; they support us with a lot of very significant cross-functional products,” said van Roten.