ILD: New Site Aims for Transparency, Consumer Self-Help

B/OSS: How does this fit into the new Web site for consumers?

D.S.: We’ve always given end-users the opportunity to log complaints 24/7 and then we would respond. But we realized our existing site really wasn’t giving end-users enough information. A lot of times customers didn’t understand ILD’s role in the process. And since our name and our customer’s name are on the bill, it became important to help everybody in the process.

So now what you’ll see is a site that tells you not only who ILD is and how the LEC billing process works, you can enter your BTN to inquire about a charge, you can find out which person put the charge on and get their contact information. The process is really full transparency and education as well as problem-solving. In the end, it’s the culmination of putting in back-end protections for our customers so they don’t get scammed, and to educate end-user customers.

B/OSS: What other functions does the site let users perform?

D.S.: It’s not only a place to log a complaint but you can cancel your service too. If you want to put a block on your bill so you don’t receive a third-party charge from ILD, you can do that. The empowering, the consumer part, is very important.

B/OSS: How might this site serve as a trendsetter?

D.S.: I don’t know of anything like it out there. But that wasn’t necessarily what our initial objective was. But I think the trendsetting element is going to be transparency — that’s something that’s absolutely critical in this process, as well as end-user empowerment.

B/OSS: What’s the reception been from your service provider customers?

D.S.: A lot of them had input in putting this thing together. I think anything that can lower the anxiety level of their clients excites them.

B/OSS: How much might this site help providers prevent churn?

D.S: The site’s only been up for two weeks so we don’t have good statistics yet on that.

B/OSS: What best practices would you recommend to service providers about their billing methods?

D.S.: We actually had an expert in the area of Internet subscription put together a best practices marketing white paper for us.

B/OSS: What’s next?

D.S.: I think a lot of what we know on that is going to come from the feedback we see from the site — it’s so early in its launch, it’s hard to tell at this stage what’s next. But we already have clients who want to link their sites to ours, and we’ve had two or three people say they’d like to white-label the self-help center and put it on their sites directly. From a tech standpoint, that’s probably our next step.