HawTel claims that system problems are consultants’ fault

Accord­ing to the Hon­olulu Adver­tiser, Hawai­ian Tel­com CEO Mike Ruley spoke dur­ing an investors’ con­fer­ence call yes­ter­day. He dis­cussed the ongo­ing issues that have plagued the tele­phone company’s cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment (CRM), order man­age­ment, billing and finan­cial report­ing systems.While he admit­ted that Haw­Tel cus­tomers will encounter these con­tin­u­ing prob­lems dur­ing 2007, Ruley passed the buck and blamed Bear­ing­Point, the firm that Haw­Tel hired to inte­grate and update these sys­tems. Haw­Tel has spent over US$11M on BearingPoint’s inte­gra­tion project, and is seek­ing addi­tional con­ces­sions. The util­itu spent an addi­tional US$22M to rent Verizon’s old sys­tems after Bear­ing­Point missed a key deliv­ery date. Yes, Haw­Tel had to rent the same sys­tems that Bear­ing­Point was sup­posed to replace!

Util­ity com­pa­nies live and die on CRM and billing sys­tems. It’s much more expen­sive to recruit a new cus­tomer than it is to keep a cur­rent cus­tomer. It’s even more dif­fi­cult to recruit a for­mer cus­tomer when they’ve received poor service.

The aver­age cus­tomer ser­vice call hold time is down from 28 min­utes in May to under 4 min­utes now, he said. The company’s goal is to have calls answered within 20 seconds.

To para­phrase Nigel Tufnel, these sys­tems are so impor­tant to HawTel’s per­for­mance that they rate an 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.Sadly, it seems that the hold times are the “extra push over the cliff” that has dri­ven more of HawTel’s land­line cus­tomers to VoIP or wireless.

Last Decem­ber, the Star-Bulletin reported on the company’s “Save the Line” cam­paign, which empow­ered Haw­Tel employ­ees to keep cur­rent land­line cus­tomers from switch­ing car­ri­ers. Ruley also announced yes­ter­day that HawTel’s IPTV (Inter­net Pro­to­col Tele­vi­sion) ser­vice will not be released in Decem­ber as the com­pany had pre­vi­ously stated. This ser­vice would help Haw­Tel pro­vide a more com­plete bun­dle of con­sumer ser­vices, when com­pared with Time Warner Cable, its biggest com­pet­i­tive rival.

The lat­est finan­cial results show that Haw­Tel is los­ing this battle.

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