Iowa Telecom on the Campaign Trail with OSG

Transpromo is an insider term if there ever was one. Nobody really uses the term with customers but everyone knows what it is. Nor is its function entirely new; service providers have been stuffing ads in their billing envelopes for years. But some things have changed and they’ve made transpromotional billing a more effective, necessary and easier option for service providers.

Shannon Seastead, marketing director at OSG Billing Services, said transpromo is the marrying of one’s bill, invoice or statement with marketing opportunities and taking full advantage of one’s monthly billing tool to reach out to customers through a venue that almost surely is going to be opened and read.

“We have always worked hard to make sure our customers take advantage of the real estate in their bill,” Seastead said. But now, she said, circumstances and technology have come into play that makes this opportunity stand out.

For instance, data mining capabilities have improved, the marketplace is more competitive, printing technology has improved dramatically and postal rates are increasing. Data mining and the portals that allow the manipulation of that data have had perhaps the greatest impact, allowing companies such as OSG to help their customers better target the right customers with advertisements.

One of the reasons Iowa Telecom (IWA) chose to do business with OSG was for this capability. Steve Kidd, marketing manager for the rural telco, said his company had been searching for a more flexible billing solution, particularly one that would improve Iowa Telecom’s ability to target its marketing campaigns. The lack of flexibility, by the way, is losing some billing vendors and their service provider customers business. According to a report this month from Accenture, 10 percent of carrier’s enterprise customers terminate their contracts because of poor billing performance, and only 27 percent of service providers feel their billing systems are highly flexible and serve as a competitive differentiator.

On the other hand, being flexible is winning business for companies such as OSG. Iowa Telecom is an aggressive marketer. However, Kidd said their messaging wasn’t targeted enough because its old system lacked the flexibility to segment its customer base in a timely manner.

“Given the variety of products we have, getting the right message to the right customer at the right time in a more real-time fashion was important,” Kidd said.