Shulist Group Inc.

On the eve of the FCC announcement of the proposed rules for net neutrality Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon Communications CEO, decided it was appropriate to float out a few gallons of FUD at the Supercomm 2009 in Chicago.
Continue reading ‘Bluster, Bluff and Braggadocio’ »

Banner day for DAVE Wireless. The newly minted wireless startup in OHANL just managed to bag C$125M in long term financing.
Continue reading ‘DAVE’s Got Dollars’ »

A friend of ours, who is a regularly reader of our Weird Telecom posts, sent us this along for your viewing pleasure. We know it’s hard to think that folks would move cable reels into buildings this way but believe us it happens more than you can imagine—hopefully with a bit more planning than these guys.
Continue reading ‘Rollin’’ »

Now here’s an interesting move by Finland’s government. They are one of the most connected countries with what has been reported as a 96% connection rate. They’ve decided to step that up a notch further with three moves that seem almost incredible given the nature of the country itself.
Continue reading ‘Cold But With Great Access’ »

Ericsson just released an interesting report ,written by Greger Blennerud, that dispels a lot of mumbo-jumbo that routinely plagues the mobile data industry. Given Ericsson’s prominence in the industry, and the fact that they have built some of the worlds most populated networks, it bodes well that they predict that broadband costs have nowhere to go but down. From their analysis it seems that mobile data can be as cheap as borscht if you run your network correctly.

Continue reading ‘Broadband Data Costs’ »

Serial entrepreneur Terry Matthews was interviewed by SKY news in the UK. Matthews, Welsh by birth and Canadian by choice has some interesting advice in the short clip. He is one of our telecom giants with his creation of a string (more than 200 by his claim) of companies. He was the founder behind such telecom greats such as Mitel and Crosskeys among others.
Continue reading ‘Telecom Tycoon Terry’ »

In a recent interview by Cecilia Kang in the Washington Post, Julius Genachowski, the Chairman of the FCC, made some interesting comments about his (and the FCC’s) role in fostering net neutrality. It makes for an interesting read and cause for some serious thinking.
Continue reading ‘FCC And Net Neutrality’ »

Bernard Lord, president and CEO of the CWTA was recently pontificating at the Intelligent Communities Summit about why wireless services in Canada are so great. He’s generally a well prepared guy but in this case it seems that he should have done his homework a little more carefully.
Continue reading ‘Wireless Wonkiness’ »

Customer service in the telecom industry, in recent years, has fallen to an all time low. With companies providing poor service, some off-shoring all service and a few having no service at all it’s no wonder that the industry is reaching to find ways to draw customers back. We’ve always held that effective OSS and BSS can be customer retainers. Seem other folks think so also.

Customer Service leverages OSS & BSS

A site we follow has published an interesting read on the connection between systems and improving customer service. You can check it out at Telesperience. The article clearly covers the territory that relates underlying support systems to the customer experience.

Some more for the list

In addition to the areas mentioned in the article there are a few items that need some further consideration.

The three areas we believe that carriers fall short of leveraging their value to customers is;

1. Order Management—in many cases orders are not managed as a continuous flow. Updates are lacking, information is missing and the result is a missed commitment leading to a poor customer service experience. A small number of great OSS companies provide an overarching process flow for orders that telecoms should adopt.
2. Service Representative Flexibility—In many cases service reps have access to your customer information ONLY while you are on the call. For us this routinely happens on service calls. This is patently stupid and leads to much wasted time for a customer. Is it that hard to allow a representative to take down the call information, complete the research, fix the problem and then call the customer back?
3. Clear Display of Service Costs—In more than one instance, in the process of requesting service changes, we have discovered that the service rep, and our own information from the carrier’s web site, did not provide any clear delineation of service charges. In at least three times this year we requested a particular service, were provided with a service charge, and had the service activated. Later we found that the service charges were wrong, and in one instance the service conflicted with another on our plan. These were resolved after numerous hours on the phone (see item 2) above.

So what’s your opinion? Is customer service improved by good support systems?

I had great memories of the wonderful things that Nortel developed over the years. It’s too bad it’s come down to this;