COMPANY PROFILE The word on the Street
Perhaps best known as a provider of billing software, Union Street is currently building a bigger reputation based on its growing portfolio of solutions, says Managing Director Tony Cook.
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ndependent supplier of telecoms billing and WLR3 solutions, Union Street now offers a full portfolio of solutions that include integration with back office systems for CRM and accounts. As well as integration with third party applications, the company is investing heavily in software development for its own solutions. Union Street has a development team operating under Technical Director, Steve Cresswell. His remit is to work on new enhancements to the core aBILLity billing platform and on the development of new modules. That kind of investment doesn’t come cheap – 35 per cent of the company’s revenue goes into R&D to advance the products and help Union Street adapt to market changes by rolling out new services.
Underlining the point, Cook cited the new Churn Manager module recently introduced for aBILLity. “It provides an analysis of customer call patterns and helps to determine trends for reducing revenue,” he said. “Using the daily CDRs (charging data records) the module will help to detect changes in customer billing as they occur. If you want to know which of your
customers may be switching to another minutes provider, this module automatically reveals the ones that are going wobbly.”
Revenue protection is another area where Union Street has made strides, because fraud is a growing problem for CPs. LineGuard, an optional module for aBILLity, is designed to not only detect but also to stop fraudulent activity. “Using LineGuard helps provide revenue protection for the CP and their customers. And reducing fraud helps reduce the chance of a customer dispute,” added Cook.
Coupled with solutions development, Union Street has been investing in its staff, including for the crucial area of revenue protection. The company recently appointed two billing managers to provide onsite support for users of Union Street’s aBILLity billing platform. “Best practice in revenue assurance means checking constantly that everything is correctly billed at the right tariffs,” he commented. “For those customers that simply don’t have time we offer a revenue assurance consultancy service where one of our billing managers will spend a day
Tony Cook Support is a key differentiator
scrutinising the CP’s system looking for any margin increasing or lost revenue opportunities. We also offer a three-day Spring Clean programme of database cleaning with training.”
Ramping up support Cook believes that support is now the key differentiator in the billing market, which is why the company has ramped up its head count of skilled industry professionals. “In addition to the two new billing managers, we’ve added two new account managers who will also be field based,” commented Cook. “We’re also introducing new tiered levels of support because a one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate for customers of different sizes and sophistication.”
Union Street’s new Platinum and Diamond support levels
are intended to provide customers with high levels of customer care, including fast fault resolution, on-site consultancy and bespoke software development. Cook noted: “We aim to provide outstanding support levels for all our customers, but we recognise that needs vary. For some very large CPs offering carrier class services a higher level of mission critical support is required. Our new service levels meet this need with a set of market leading SLAs that the bigger players can count on.”
The needs of the bigger communication providers are also met with a new white labelled services. Cook commented: “We’ve introduced white labelling of aBILLity, WLR3 and other services to allow network carriers to resell these services to their own channel partners with their own branding.
It allows telcos to compete with large aggregators by offering our solutions portfolio as part of their wholesale proposition. The aBILLity platform can now be easily deployed from our hosting centre at Rackspace and can be customised to meet the precise needs of the wholesale provider.”
Cook also says that Union Street is becoming a single source supplier for back office functions to communication providers. “We have found that many of our customers are looking for a more strategic partnership with Union Street as we are a critical supplier to their business,” he commented. “They have a greater interest in our development roadmap and want the opportunity to influence the product direction. And we are definitely open to new ideas and innovations.”
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50 COMMS DEALER MARCH 2011
www.comms-dealer.com
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