WILTEL EMERGENCE PROVIDES EARLY GLIMPSE OF MCI'S TASK

As the world watches, some in wonder and some in disgust, as WorldCom tries to reinvent itself by taking on a trusted old name and emerging from bankruptcy and scandal with operational efficiencies to match its tummy-tucked debt load, WorldCom, now MCI, will be watching WilTel Communications. The wholesale communications provider formerly known as Williams Communications will announce this week the realization of operational improvements through a Siebel Systems deployment.

With a prior benchmark customer satisfaction rate of 56%, due primarily to a less-than-automated ordering process, WilTel had nowhere to go but up. However, recognizing it had a problem and trying to fix it while reducing the head count required for a mostly manual process was a challenge, said Jane Porter, vice president of service delivery for WilTel.

“As we were trying to restructure and become more profitable, it was very important that we look at our head count and at being efficient,” Porter said. “But if you are bogged down in an order entry system, you are shooting yourself in the foot before you can't even get on track.”

Pressure from the company's carrier customers to reduce ordering intervals, as well as from competitors such as Level 3, which built its own automated order entry system last year, had WilTel looking for new ways to respond. As part of a phased approach to implementing a new business process infrastructure, the company picked Siebel's Communications solution to manage the front end of that infrastructure.

Using Siebel's software for capturing, validating and tracking information related to service orders, WilTel said it reduced its order entry time by 50% to 80% and cut $10,000 per month from its cost of processing orders. Subsequently, the carrier improved its overall customer satisfaction rate as much as 89%.

“I truly believe your service delivery process is so critical that everything else flows behind it,” Porter said. Getting that process streamlined drove our customer satisfaction [improvement].”

A 56% customer satisfaction rate suggests more than a mere process problem, though. “Our attitude changed with regards to striving more for a customer-requested due date rather than using standard intervals,” Porter said.

Standard intervals such as 30 days to turn up a digital signal service or 60 days for an optical carrier service are no more, she said. Siebel helped solve issues on the front end of that process, which just gets the order into the system. There, Porter said, intervals have been reduced from one-to-10 hours to as little as 15 minutes.

Phase four of WilTel's operational makeover, which is being coordinated by CGE&Y, will include a provisioning and order management system (openCI) from Open Telecommunications, an Australian telecom software company. It will include a Web portal for customers to reserve and order their own services.

“There are areas of expertise that are required to deliver an end-to-end solution and we don't pretend for a minute to do all of these ourselves,” said Dan Ford, general manager of Siebel's Communications and Media Group, noting that the company relies on numerous alliances and relationships.

It also helps to have a foot in the door. Siebel previously was supplying WilTel with sales force solutions. Porter saw the Siebel Communications solution as a way to get every account related process into the same system, letting the company's project managers be project managers and not order entry clerks.

In fact, better processes will go a long way in shaping the image of the new WilTel, Porter said. “We believe our ability to meet customer expectations is what's going to make us survive. I definitely don't want to be the reason we don't,” she said.