Acumen Solutions Makes e-commerce Easy-Commerce for RCN

Back in October, Herndon, Va.-based RCN Corp. decided its e-commerce system just wasn’t doing the job. This was unfortunate for several reasons, not the least of which being that the system was installed just last April and the company was, along with the rest of the world, facing a turgid economy where every penny saved was a penny earned.

As a competitive multiservice provider RCN needed a state-of-the-art e-commerce system that reflected its growing number of offerings for cable, telco and data customers. And if “the [existing] e-commerce system wasn’t as flexible as we were hoping for in our long-term strategy,” as Kara van Roten, RCN’s director of Web strategy described it, something had to be done quickly.

The Web portal had to work more easily for the 428,000 residential and SMB customers RCN claimed as of its third quarter and especially for new customers coming to the site to sign up for services. At the same time, the company had to pinch pennies. Thus, while the need for a new e-commerce system was as clear as a bright blue summer morning, getting the right one in place was like slogging through three feet of wet snow on a country road.

The carrier — and its chosen vendors — had to overhaul the existing system while maintaining a back-office infrastructure, especially the Convergys billing piece that was working just fine. In short, van Roten’s task was to make things easier for existing and potential customers and simultaneously save the company money.

“That’s pretty damned complex to do,” said John Konczal, global industry executive for communications and media at Sterling Commerce, a business process integration company owned by AT&T Inc.

RCN started by bringing in a new partner, Acumen Solutions, to frame out a solution that would minimize or actually obviate the impact on the existing billing system while presenting consumers with a full menu of features, services and options. Acumen Solutions, in turn, recruited Sterling Commerce and its e-commerce application.

“[Sterling is] used to the market of the e-commerce vendor ... and can bring not only innovative software and products but also a lot of know-how that allows us to integrate our e-commerce capabilities into some pretty complex environments such as RCN’s,” said Konczal.

The RCN/Acumen Solutions/Sterling triumvirate created a “three-headed beast of a team” to finish off the project, said Tom Bullotta, director of communication and media practice for Acumen Solutions. This included planning and building an e-commerce system that gives RCN an end-to-end look at a customer order via an interface with the Internet that also connects quite nicely with the Convergys billing system to not only inform prospective buyers of package prices, but to make certain no minute of service goes unbilled.

While it sounds simple, there’s really no proper way to explain the complexity of offering customers multiple choices of TV programming packages, high-speed data download/upload speeds and even voice features on an a la carte or bundled basis. On top of that, the system continually must update the information to allow for new competitive offers that meet or match those being proffered by increasingly nimble cable, satellite and telecom providers all fighting for the same customers.