Unified Software Platform

The launch of these new Amdocs consulting services comes on the heels of the second element of Amdocs' marketing overhaul: a first time offering of a unified software platform. In mid-February, Amdocs launched Amdocs 6, a pre-integrated portfolio of modular, billing, CRM, self-service, order management, mediation, and content revenue management software products aimed at easing and accelerating the adoption of the ICM strategy.

According to a recent Amdocs' study, almost 75 percent of surveyed consumers think their CSP only sometimes, seldom, or never understands their needs. Surprisingly, the survey also revealed that 34 percent of women and nearly 20 percent of men would rather give birth than interact with inexperienced or unhelpful customer service representatives. While consumers clearly identified short hold times and friendly staff as key determinants of good customer service, more than 64 percent felt that their providers only improved customer service when faced with the threat of either the loss of business or increased competitive pressure. Quite simply, when offered an ample choice of providers and services, consumers today feel the easiest and best way to express dissatisfaction is to take their business elsewhere.

Therefore, the products in the new Amdocs 6 portfolio are going to be pre-integrated to remove process barriers across the customer life cycle, from targeting, selling, and delivering, to billing and supporting each customer at all touch-points, including the Web, contact center or bill mailing. Technical platform integration aims at reducing implementation costs for service providers and driving a lower TCO. Key products within the Amdocs 6 portfolio include

• Amdocs Billing 6. A fully convergent billing product, designed to meet the evolving needs of the world's largest CSPs prepaid, postpaid, voice, and data billing operations.
  
  
• Amdocs CRM 6 . Delivers out-of-the-box solutions to optimize customer-centric business processes.
  
  
• Amdocs Order Management 6. A scalable order management product designed to meet the complex ordering requirements of CSPs.
  
  
• Amdocs Content Revenue Management 6. Manages the content supply chain from the partner's domain, through the operator's environment, to the end consumer.
  
  
• Amdocs Mediation 6. A single converged system that adapts to diverse requirements and executes large-scale service logic to address CSPs' most urgent objectives: reducing TCO and increasing business agility.

For instance, the self-service system that Amdocs will provide as part of the platform will purportedly enable telecommunications subscribers to self-manage their budgets via the Internet. They will be able to order and change services, change their account information, check the status of a service they have ordered, and so forth. This system provides subscribers with what amounts to an independent and automated customer service center, thereby relieving the operator's customer service center of a great burden.

Also, in order to provide customers with integration between systems, Amdocs has also developed an integrated catalogue, in contrast to the separate ones it has previously used for each system. The integrated catalogue is software that enables operators to define the systems and services that they want to order. At the same time, users can still order each Amdocs system separately, since the vendor has found that most of its customers prefer switching to an integrated system in stages.