Self-Serve Service

Most people love a buffet every once in a while. There is no waiting for food, they can choose from several main entrees and dozens of side dishes, and if they want to forgo the vegetables and eat nothing but dessert all night, they can.

The ability to choose appeals to people in every aspect of their lives. Like restaurants that cater to do-it-yourselfers, the wireless industry is starting to test self-provisioning. Also known as self-activation, self-provisioning is a simple concept: Wireless customers can activate a new service or feature themselves, without having to go through intermediaries. How to actually offer it to your customers is not always so simple, however. As is always the case with upgrading customer service, financial and technological challenges must be overcome.

The Case for Self-Provisioning James Airy, Metapath vice president of marketing, cited Federal Express as an example of how self-provisioning can work for you. Since FedEx opened up package tracking to major accounts years ago, customers can track their own packages instead of calling customer service to locate the package. Customers love the idea, and FedEx saves money because it does not need as many representatives standing by.

"The idea is somewhat similar in the wireless world," he said. "Your customers or resellers can activate, de-activate and change service without going through you to do it."

Janice Jens, Kenan Systems mobile industry marketing manager, said the benefits of self-provisioning to carriers are endless. Because you have additional distribution channels, you can reach customers through mass merchandising. For example, Air-Touch offers complete cellular packages on the shelves of Office Depot and Staples. Airadigm sells service through Staples as well, and PrimeCo displays its product at Best Buy and Office Depot.

"With the voice market moving from high-end business customers, wireless service prices have dropped, and it has become a mass-market service where people can get tons of minutes for a very low price," she said. "The best way to reach these consumers is through the distribution channels that they are familiar with, so you do not have to use your own retail store."

Peter Green, SEMA Group vice president of sales and marketing, added that self-provisioning also can save you money. There is a high cost associated with customer-care operations when you add your customer service representatives' (CSR) salaries to the cost of hardware. Instead of spending time setting up service, your highly skilled employees can deal with customer concerns and complaints.

Another issue to consider is inventory, he continued. When you pre-provision phones, you must keep a variety of them in stock for each different outlet. However, if you have one unprogrammed model in stock, your inventory is considerably less.

To the end user, he said, the pros to self-provisioning are obvious. People like to feel in control, and they can add or delete services themselves, which gives them the freedom of choice. The major highlight is that their service is up within minutes, even seconds. People don't like to buy a phone and then have to wait until the next day to activate it because the offices are closed.

"It would be like children at Christmas who get a new toy, then realize no battery was included, and they have to wait until the store opens the next day to buy one," he said.

Last December, PrimeCo announced it would become the first CDMA wireless service provider to allow customers to activate service over the air (OTA), which enables it to assign phone numbers to handsets within 30 seconds. Customers dial *ACT (*228), the industry-standard code designated for activation, and PrimeCo customer-care consultants activate service by uploading the serial number of the phone into a customer database via a data channel. The system automatically assigns and programs a phone number within seconds, said Tom Sayor, PrimeCo's executive director of product management. Sayor said the service has met all of PrimeCo's expectations during the first seven months it has been available. Initially, PrimeCo hoped to shave five minutes off the provisioning time, a goal that has been achieved.

"The most important factor is the anecdotal evidence from customers who tell us they appreciate it," he said. "The customer can be driving home from the store, and service is activated before they even get there. That is the biggest plus."

Choose Carefully Although there are pluses to self-provisioning, you should be careful that your budget and network can handle all that goes into putting it into place. Bennesa Lyon, Tandem director of wireless markets and global telecom marketing, said most carriers have not yet done it because they cannot prove it in a business case. It is expensive to roll out something when you cannot charge the end-user for it, and self-provisioning is not a revenue-generating feature.

Sayor acknowledged that the cost of implementing the program is significant; in PrimeCo's case, it represents a multimillion-dollar investment in technology. But Sayor said the company focused on ways that it would save money when it wrote its business case. It predicted self-provisioning would shave 33% off of the activation time, a major cost savings, and it did. The time saved on activation allows PrimeCo's CSRs to spend more time on quality issues and improve the overall customer experience.

Anthony Caputo, SEMA's vice president of sales, said the level of financial concern depends on your situation. If you have older infrastructure and technology, it will be more expensive to upgrade than for new carriers; but then again, you probably have more money to do it.

"Larger carriers are more open to the whole concept," he said. "If you are a new start-up and financially sensitive, OTA is a serious issue. You have to take cost into consideration."

Lyon said that if you are a new PCS provider and can include OTA in your infrastructure contracts, deploying it is expensive, but it is less expensive than for your competitors who do not have the luxury of starting from scratch.

"If you have any inkling that you might want to roll out OTA in the future, make sure it is included in future contracts," she advised.

There are other things to watch out for with self-provisioning, cautioned Airy. OTA is extremely complex to roll out from a network, billing and customer-care perspective. First, the phone has to be able to accept OTA commands. This part is becoming easier as OTA software should become standard in virtually all future digital phones. Next, the carrier itself has to have a system in place to send commands over the air to the phone.

Sayor admitted that PrimeCo spent thousands of staff hours to streamline its software and modify numerous integrated systems and processes, including billing, call-center systems and network components. It also necessitated revisions to the handset.

"But that is part of product management," he said. "You have to do those things, even though they are expensive. We worked through all of the problems in development and launching, plus the technological and billing issues, offering it in a limited amount of markets. Then we will offer it in all markets at the end of the third quarter."

Overall, he concluded, it has been worth every penny.

Shopping for Service Some carriers are looking at the Internet as a self-provisioning tool, and software solutions to help wireless carriers set up electronic storefronts are popping up everywhere. Typically, users go to the web page and pick out all of the features they want and then send the order off via the web. Your CSRs get the order and then notify your fulfillment center to ship the phone, Airy said. The phone is activated and programmed manually at the fulfillment house before it is shipped. If you do not want to invest in manual programming and already have OTA in place, you can ship it unprogrammed and then activate it once the customer receives the phone.

"The advantage to sending it unprogrammed is that if the phone gets mis-shipped somehow, no one can use it for fraudulent purposes," Airy said.

AirTouch has received a tremendous response in Los Angeles from customers who have set up service through its web site, said Melissa May, AirTouch spokesperson.

The site, www.airtouch.com, features a rate-plan optimizer where customers can plug in information about their usage, and it will produce the best rate plan. The company's on-line store, which it has launched in Los Angeles and San Diego, has been popular as well. There, subscribers in Southern California can order a complete cellular package through the Internet.

"We think it is a nice place to shop," May said. "It's easy for people to get to; there is no inconvenience with parking or weather. Customers can sit in the comfort of their own homes, pressure free, and identify all of the products and services we offer."

Jean Pelegrin, Airadigm Communications marketing communications manager, said the company plans to launch a web site store this year where its Einstein Personal Communications customers can select a phone, rate plan and features, and then the phone is delivered to them. At that time, they would still make a call to the customer-care department, which would activate service over the air.

Tandem's Lyon noted that while the Internet can help with distribution channels, it does not do anything about programming the handsets.

"You have not eliminated human intervention," she said.

Although some carriers are exploring the possibility of interactive voice response (IVR), where subscribers would receive a phone number, choose features and pick rate plans through a series of touch-tone options rather than speaking directly with a CSR, Pelegrin said Airadigm's contact with customers is vital. Human intervention in combination with OTA does not add more time to the call for Airadigm because customers fill out a form before they call so they are not hunting around for their social security numbers or trying to come up with passwords beforehand.

"We absolutely like to have human contact," she said. "We are a local company. We know the area, and we know a lot of people. We like to keep the relationship personal, and the company is there to support the service. I could not imagine we would ever go to an IVR process."

PrimeCo also is hesitant to switch to IVR, Sayor said.

"There is nothing that PrimeCo would want to do that would take away contact with humans, if that is what people want," he said. "Some people are all too happy to deal with machines, and they feel comfortable with consumer activation."

Simple Meat & Potatoes Kenan's Jens said that if you do offer self-provisioning, you need to make sure your plan is cleanly executed. Your success hinges on offering a simple package; if customers are confused, it defeats the purpose because people will spend more time on the phone with your CSRs.

Airadigm Communications solved the confusion issue by placing an insert into PCS phone boxes so that when customers open the package, it is the first thing they see. The insert instructs a customer, step by step, what to do before he calls customer service, Pelegrin said. It shows him where to find the serial number, how to put the battery and antenna in, and how to turn on the phone. It asks him to have his social security number handy and to choose an account password. When he is ready to call a CSR, he dials 611, a free call, and the CSR activates service OTA.

The Future of OTA Right now, PrimeCo uses OTA to assign phone numbers to handsets. Longer term, it will facilitate roaming by enabling the transmission of codes that designate PrimeCo's preferred roaming partners. It also will be used to download software upgrades and other data directly to the customer handsets and to activate new phone features.

SEMA's Green said right now it is possible, for example, to locate all of the donut shops in a 1-mile radius, but with OTA, a phone's directory in the future might update itself as the user roams around the United States.

"The OTA service is an enabling technology," Caputo said. "The service will allow carriers to personalize their customers' PCS phones. As an example, during the day the phone can be programmed to support a set of requirements like work phone numbers or access to work-related data. At night and on weekends, it could be reprogrammed to take on a more social personality with a directory of theaters and restaurants."

No one knows for certain what the future of wireless looks like, but these carriers are banking on the hope that OTA will have enormous capabilities. In a world where everything is becoming more customized, allowing customers to set up their own service could be the wave of the future.

Self-provisioning is all the rage in customer care these days, and several vendors recently announced solutions for over-the-air activation and service provisioning through the Internet.

At Supercomm, Intertech Management Group announced that Swisscom North America selected its Network Strategies to support its growing customer base. The solution includes, in addition to other things, Internet interactive direct customer access to billing and customer care for order entry, provisioning and payment.

Also, NCR and SMART Technologies demonstrated eCustomer Enterprise Relationship Management Software. The product has two primary components: SMART Touchpoints, customer-driven applications for customer channel enabling, dynamic customer interaction and customer-driven service and support; and SMART DNA, infrastructure and architecture for processing customer interactions over the Web. NCR resells SMART's eCustomer software to telecommunications companies to provide e-commerce solutions with an on-line catalog.

At Billing '98, SEMA Group discussed OTAF (Over the Air Activation Function), which is available to carriers and expedites the process by which potential wireless subscribers can activate new wireless services or current subscribers can request changes in their existing service without the intervention of a third party or parties.

And last month, Metapath released its Cerve Provisioning Manager 2.0. The software adapts quickly to either OTA or the Internet and supports the transfer of commands from the activation order to the network elements while providing smooth interaction with billing systems.