Bill review has long been a sales tool for telecom agents looking to convince business customers to switch their services to a new service provider that would presumably be able to offer lower rates. It was a short step for them to then audit what was billed against what was actually provided and/or contracted. And, then another short step to question whether those services were the right ones in the first place and to get the customers on the best services, plans and vendors. Mission accomplished.
Not quite. Agents quickly learned that keeping telecom environments and expenses under control for their customers required regular monitoring and management. Company growth or contraction and changing technology options and rates are among the reasons the status quo doesn’t remain optimal. So many agents developed business process outsourcing (BPO) offers that incorporate these disciplines — from sourcing to inventory control to expense management. Some have taken advantage of the offers from the emerging industry of software vendors that arose to automate management of these functions for enterprises. But some agents have found these accounting-centered offers lacking and taken matters into their own hands, developing their own software to better match their needs.
One of these agencies is Spectrum Inc., a master agency out of Cincinnati. “When we were approached by our customers to take over their wireless we thought we would just go partner with someone to assist. We partnered with a [TEM] company but quickly learned their focus was not on telecom and at every turn it seemed we were reinventing the wheel,” said Spectrum CEO Troy McCracken, noting the solutions Spectrum evaluated were designed to audit, but not to support telecom environments.
TEM Defined
Source: AOTMP |
Instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, Spectrum in 2006 developed its own hosted software as a service under the TrueVue brand. “There is a huge difference in building an application that a customer uses to help them manage their own telecom environment more efficiently and [one] that is built to help agents better manage their customer’s telecom environment,” McCracken said.
TrueVue manages the complete telecom life cycle, including benchmarking current services, service order management, asset management, expense management, invoice visibility and auditing and customized analytical reporting for wireless and wireline services. McCracken said its primary differentiators in TEM market are that TrueVue is user-friendly and logic-driven. “You can get anywhere in three clicks or less,” he said. Spectrum’s multiformat (EDI, pdf and paper) invoice processing is patent-pending.
