Another Converged Service Partnership? Who Cares?

By Al Brisard, Vertek Corp.

In the fast-paced world of a telecommunications carrier, providing your customers with new products and services often requires innovative thinking and quick actions to get the new offerings to market ahead of your competitors. Providing converged service offerings with one or more partners that are complementary to your existing offerings has historically been considered one of the most expeditious methods of bringing new capabilities to market. 

However, it is important to remember that when you are securing a new partner and implementing a new product or service as part of your overall offering, there will inevitably be some aspects of each converged service partnership that will be unique. You must handle these unique aspects carefully, and ultimately make the process of taking on new partners and providing the new services as seamless and transparent as possible for your customers. Service provider partners who do this, and who do not just focus on speedy time-to-market, will be the most successful.

While most partnerships are driven from the top down in a carrier organization, a critical factor in the success of these ventures is assuring that the various key stakeholders in the process have “bought in" to the objectives of each partnership. They need to be prepared to do what is necessary to bring the products and services to market in the same well-coordinated, thorough and timely fashion as they do for internally developed offerings. 

Six of the most important stakeholder communities involved in the successful  implementation of new core service offerings through convergent service partnerships are listed below. Carriers who overlook one or more of these entities in their rush to bring new services to market do so at their own risk.

Product Management plays a pivotal role in the development of a convergent service partnership. You should give this group the charter to find, assess and recommend partners for converged service offerings, and gain consensus that the chosen partner is the right one for the market they are addressing. Once your company agrees to enter into a partnership, it is product management that typically owns the relationship, creates the business case and champions the importance of the partnership to other groups within your organization. This group should be the driver of the development, implementation and packaging of the convergent service program, and create a culture of inclusion rather than exclusion of the other stakeholders in the process. Because, in the end, product management owns the P&L for the products and the business as a whole.

And don’t forget compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). All financial processes must be managed by finance according to SOX rules and regulations, and the responsibility for accurate documentation proving compliance with SOX rests with the finance team.

Operations, including IT, has its own challenges. They must implement a program that is most likely outside their typical way of operating, and adjustments will have to be made to accommodate the new partnership. New billing and collection cycles might have to be accounted for,  payment of commissions and fees will need to be considered and billing arrangements will have to be modified to include the new services that customers will have on their monthly bills. B/OSS considerations must be dealt with as well. What supporting processes are required, such as network inventory maintenance, provisioning services, configuration of network components and fault management? Business systems and processes need to be evaluated and modified to include new ways to deal with your customers, taking orders, processing bills and collecting payments.

Bringing IT on board at an early stage in the project planning process will only help accelerate and smooth out the implementation.  IT must be able to evaluate what unique needs the partnership will have as soon as possible in order to have the time to modify the IT operations wherever necessary and ensure seamless operation. It is also the job of IT to store the electronic records associated with the partnership in accordance with SOX. These records, along with all pertinent e-mails, must be saved for at least five years to ensure your company is compliance with the Act. Penalties for non-compliance can be severe.

Legal and Business Development, working with Finance and Product Management, are responsible for getting the right financial deal. To do so, they need to be intimately involved in negotiating the partnership, and determining whether the deal makes good business sense for your company. They should also be responsible for reviewing and determining the ramifications of a partner contract and any liabilities that your company might incur, and they need to pay attention to the implementation and operational aspects of the contract.  Agreeing to terms and conditions that cannot be measured or monitored are not worth much. Ultimately, it is legal’s role to ensure that risk to the company is minimized.

Sales and Marketing has to be onboard, because if they’re not committed to doing everything possible to market and sell the new combined products or services as part of the overall offering of your company, then the partnership won’t be successful. Commissions, promotions, packaging and messaging are all critical to the efforts to launch and continue to promote the product, and details of these aspects of sales and marketing need to be understood early on, since it will probably need to become part of the partnership contract. Different commissions for selling the new product or combination of products must be determined if they differ from those traditionally sold by the carrier. And if PR is part of your marketing mix, the communications group needs adequate time to handle the announcement of the partnership, position the product properly and work with the PR department within the partner organization to ensure a timely joint press release and coordinated editorial follow-up.

Partner – last but not least, the partner you are planning on doing business with is a key stakeholder. All the activity in your company will, in many instances, be a mirror image of the activity going on at the partner’s site. Members of your product management group should be in close contact with their counterparts in the partner’s product management group to ensure that both companies proceed as one toward the day the product or products are ready to be announced and integrated into your offerings.

Al Brisard is vice president of marketing and business development at Vertek Corp., a leading provider of end-to-end business process outsourcing, business consulting and managed business assurance offerings that allow communication providers to reduce costs, improve customer experiences, grow revenue and ultimately improve profitability. Contact him at: abrisard@vertek.com.