Challenge: The convergence of service offerings between traditional telephone companies and cable service provides has erased the boundary lines between the two businesses. Both industries are offering phone and a variety of broadband services resulting in great increase in competition.

While increasing competition is ultimately good for consumers, new pricing models are reducing margins for service providers. To combat lower prices traditional telephone communication and cable companies work to offer "bundled" services. In addition to offering adding savings for their consumers, bundled service offerings also increase customer retention and reduce "churn".

For the past decade traditional land line as well as wireless communication providers have sought new "add-on" services to bolster their offering to reduce churn while simultaneously attracting new customers.

New service offerings continue to be introduced at dizzying speed as the main attack to thwart competition. Clearly, the importance of customer acquisition, as well as retention is one of the most important challenges facing communication and cable service providers. Key to all successful customer facing opportunities is providing superior service. Efficient order entry, service provisioning and response to customer inquiries become crucial in this effort.

Competition is driving communication service providers to increase their new customer acquisition practices. Many are seeking new and innovative ways to attract new customers. A growing practice involves the utilization of third part "door-to-door" sales vendors and has proven extremely effective in acquiring and upgrading customers. However, the benefit of this sales channel also increases the complexity of the sales process. A multitude of service bundle offerings, service availability, divergent systems create a complex order process that requires careful integration to insure proper order provisioning. Too often the multitude of applications and variety of services has lead to lost and incorrect orders resulting in costly revenue losses.

FFP's history in the telecommunications industry spans more than a decade. We have worked with many of the leading telephone carriers, cable service providers, as well as local communication service providers. Through this first hand experience in providing customer acquisition support, we have developed and continue to refine our order entry management system that has provided the industries highest degree successful completion.