billso.com

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.

Blog: I’m told that a few people are reading this blog. Friends, students, and random people who find these entries amusing are more than welcome here. I write for myself, to vent, to record articles I’ll want to find later, and to spread the snarky love from my secret volcanic lair.

Remember that you can always subscribe to my blog through My Yahoo, Bloglines or an RSS reader. Look for the subscription links on the right side of the page. I like Web-based readers a lot, as I use several computers and don’t want to install an RSS client on them all.

Google is starting to catch up on my entries, and I’m looking for another search engine solution to help you find your way around.

In the meantime, Clay Shirky has an interesting article about the domination of a few blogs, which provides some inspiration to get me through the bloggy tropical evenings.

Aloha!

Tech: Technical doublespeak hits a new low. Enjoy this Windows media video.