Zhejiang Telecom: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Billing Platform

In the midst of its transformation from a large, state-owned operator to a customer-focused provider, Zhejiang Telecom engaged Accenture to establish a customer relationship management (CRM) and billing platform that would improve service quality.

Zhejiang Telecom is one of the largest subsidiaries of the China Telecom Group and a leading provider of telecommunications services to Zhejiang province.

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As the former state operator, Zhejiang Telecom inherited dominance of the provincial telecommunications market.

However, as the market has liberalized over the past few years, competition has become more intense. Like many other markets around the world, the Chinese telecommunications market is characterized by slowing growth in fixed lines as customers initiate service with mobile operators. China Telecom and its subsidiaries have been focusing on value-added, broadband services to drive growth.

For Zhejiang Telecom, the conundrum was how to create a strategy for growth in the shorter term that also would support its longer-term plans.

Executives decided that clear imperatives were to:

• Deliver better customer relationship management
  
  
• Slow churn
  
  
• Lower the cost of sales by selling more services to customers
  
  
• Create a more efficient and cost-effective business that would increase profitability and revenue

Accenture was solution architect as well as systems integrator, developing business processes and testing and verifying system capabilities.

The Accenture and Zhejiang Telecom teams created a blueprint for replacing all city-level legacy customer care and legacy billing systems. Their strategy centralized these systems at a provincial level. Zhejiang Telecom wanted packaged software with minimal customization implemented, partly to drive down operational costs and partly to maximize the opportunities to create synergies across the business as a whole.

Accenture leveraged our strong alliance relationships with Oracle, Comverse and BEA to implement distinctive customer relationship management and billing platform solutions.

During the project’s pilot phase in the city of Wenzhou, Accenture’s solution helped Zhejiang Telecom significantly increase the number of customers who purchased bundled services each month. Zhejiang Telecom moved quickly to roll out the solution to additional cities. By May 2007, the entire province was online with the new system, which will give Zhejiang Telecom a competitive edge when China allows “third-generation” mobile telephone services such as wireless broadband.

Zhejiang has also been able to increase the average revenue per user by growing the number of customers to whom it sells bundled services. The carrier improved its performance on this metric by 25 percent per month during the pilot phase. Early indications are that this growth is being replicated throughout the project.

Accenture’s work in helping to integrate Zhejiang Telecom’s business support systems received the Best Project Award of 2006 from Billing China, an organization focusing on the Chinese telecommunications industry, as well as two other major industry awards.

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