Amdocs provides relationship therapy at Billing World

Amdocs introduced advances in its customer and partner relationship management products this week aimed at cost reduction and customer satisfaction. The company released ClarifyCRM version 12 and Partner Relationship Management (PRM) version 5 in Miami at TeleStrategies’ Billing World conference.

Amdocs ClarifyCRM 12 includes a new module called the Customer Interaction Manager, which provides a single interface to Amdocs’ ClarifyCRM software and other applications and business processes. It presents contact center personnel with the actionable data required to complete a task or up sell a customer from a single screen.

“We are operating in more and more complex environments where, particularly in the contact center, we are getting information overload,” said Peter Hurst, vice president of marketing and alliances at Amdocs. “Knowing what actions to take at the right time for the right customer becomes even more difficult.”

The product’s new marketing tools address this problem. They can be used to help predict customer behavior and supplies targeted offers that contact center reps can present to the customer.

Amdocs called this a major release for the now fully integrated CRM division within the company. Amdocs bought Clarify from Nortel Networks in November of 2001. The combined customer relationship management capabilities now include processes for service, support, selling and marketing as well as order management and billing.

Amdocs’ PRM, a solution for managing billing and revenue settlement agreements between partners, including business agreements, rating, invoicing, payment exchange and reconciliation now offers convergent support for content, commerce and inter-carriers partnerships. Version 5 also has added self-care capabilities and improved the scalability and performance. It now includes drill-down access to mid-cycle billing details, query-driven information, and agreement and revenue settlement arrangements.

Connex, a Vodafone affiliate and the Romanian provider of GSM telephony, recently selected Amdocs PRM. Amdocs also announced this week completion of work in its bread-and- butter billing business. The company completed the deployment of customer care and billing platform at Nextel Communications as part of its nine-year outsourcing agreement. Amdocs replaced 11 databases and 14 legacy systems while migrating 11 million customers onto one Amdocs billing platform.