Customer retention hasn't been a major issue for CLECs to date. Competitive carriers have been more concerned with getting their networks up and running, and capturing the customer in the first place. And, as I mention on (see story here), time to market is still a major priority for competitive carriers.
Of course, that doesn't make serving the customer any less important. Indeed, offering more and often lower-priced services was what allowed competitive carriers to grab customers in the first place. Now CLECs are trying to differentiate themselves less based on price and more based on the services--and customer service--they offer.
They're doing this by offering what they describe as a higher level of service, responding quickly to customers, targeting traditionally underserved markets and offering customers more options (on billing, for example)--good long-term strategies for not just capturing, but actually keeping customers.
"Our churn is less than 1 percent a month," says Robert Taylor, president and CEO of Focal Communications Corp. (www.focal.com). "What that is indicative of is the level of service that a new competitor, Focal, can come in and deliver. People out there think the Bells are as good as anyone can be in the industry. Not true."
Focal, which provides voice services to large corporate customers and services resellers, guarantees installation dates, which is typically 24 hours or less for collocated customers and 20 days or less for customers that are not collocated with Focal.
"If you want to collocate with us, that is put in a piece of equipment, we'll guarantee immediate availability--so there's space, power, air conditioning, cages already there for you. The Bells are 90 to 180 days [on collocation]," Taylor says. "When we guarantee the quality of service to our customers, we guarantee it at a higher level than the Bells do in terms of outage credits.
"Finally, we've built a better network. All of the Bells' networks are built on statistical blockage properties; ours is built so every call goes through," Taylor says. "We have built a network with the hindsight of the Internet in the way we engineer it. We have built our network on the expectation that every customer we sell we expect them to use their phone 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. In that manner our customers never get fast busy signals, they never get all circuits are busy. Every call they need to make or receive gets through."
Of course, despite the best efforts, there are sometimes outages. But carriers that act quickly and decisively in these emergencies can keep customers satisfied. A good example was how Choice One Communications (www.choiceonecom.com) responded in October when service in Albany, N.Y., was cut for nearly seven hours. According to Chairman and CEO Steve Dubnik, Choice One delivered cellular phones to its customers and forwarded the wireline calls to the wireless phones. It cost the carrier between $8,000 and $9,000, but was well worth the cost, says Dubnik.
Targeting customers that haven't been well-served by incumbent telcos is another strategy for new competitors such as Choice One and DSL.net (www.dsl.net), among others, that are bringing services to small and medium-sized businesses.
And, tying in with this issue's Billing and Customer Care theme, billing can provide further differentiation for a competitor, notes Advanced TelCom Group Inc. (ATG) (www.callatg.com) Chairman and CEO Clifford Rudolph.
"Price is not the issue," Rudolph says. "It's service and simplicity."
That includes making the bill more readable and, in the future, will include making it easier for customers to budget for telecom and have the option not to receive certain billing information and receive discounts as a result.
In the future, Rudolph says, ATG wants to offer flat-rate pricing for certain services and credit users later if the user's usage is lower than is covered under that rate. ATG also is looking into making it an option not to get that call detail record and receive savings.
"I think that's coming, and that's true for residential or small and medium[-sized] businesses," he says. "Even large companies allocate bills by department, but they don't audit it."
