UTS Transforms Caribbean-Style With Comverse

United Telecommunications Services serves relatively small markets in the Caribbean, but the diversity of its customer base and its services, and its multitude of legacy systems called for a transformation. Comverse answered the call but offered a new kind of transformation.

UTS’ market comprises seven territories: Curacao, Bonaire, Sint Maarten (Dutch), Saint Martin (French), Sint Eustatius, Saba and Suriname. Within these territories, four languages are spoken and the people use five different currencies. They also have wireless, wireline, broadband and pay TV services. This makes them a microcosm of a large multinational operator, said Alice Bartram, AVP of billing and active customer management marketing at Comverse.

That they operated nine different billing systems and other systems long-in-the-tooth had UTS thinking of consolidating systems and doing a traditional transformation that would leave them with only one for prepaid customers and one for postpaid. However, Comverse convinced UTS to take it a step further and put its Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution across its entire subscriber base.

UTS is now the third service provider to deploy Comverse ONE. Bartram said UTS is being the most ambitious in the scope of their approach to convergence. The Comverse ONE solution will support UTS' full quad-play offering including fixed, wireless, broadband (data) and cable TV services, enabling UTS to provide a broad selection of service packages and an enhanced customer experience.

“A few years ago everyone was talking transformation, transformation. But they are doing a new style transformation, which is to define your target architecture then get your business onto it in a phased or managed approach,” Bartram said.

Comverse ONE will allow UTS to create cross-product and cross-service bundles or let their customers design their own. It provides a single provisioning point for all services and support new business models such as getting its entire quad play onto a single bill.

UTS will have a single, integrated data model and customer management system that allows it to support prepay, postpaid and hybrid billing models from the same system and offer real-time marketing capabilities and self-service options. It also will have a single view of the customer for its customer care department.

“UTS saw how recasting their business around this converged approach would bring huge efficiency benefits and customer management benefits,” Bartram said. “They now have an approach that allows them to evolve as their business needs evolve. That was a driving force behind how we built Comverse ONE.”