Data is key to attracting and keeping customers, especially in the highly competitive communications service provider space. So is self-empowerment. Aperio CI has come out with several new and enhanced existing solutions that imaginatively utilize data and empowerment to meet those objectives: Pricing Genie, Retention Genie, and Visual Bill Manager.

 

Pricing Genie, the cornerstone of Aperio CI’s (News - Alert) new Genie suite of solutions, is a powerful visual tool for modeling, testing and launching new plans and managing them in one central location. It equips carriers with valuable and precise information to verify the impact of internal and competitive pricing structures within the marketplace.  

 

Pricing Genie calculates and measures the impact of rate plan changes to a carrier’s customer base. It enables carriers to manage and measure the revenue impact of:

 

*          “What-if” scenarios

*          Implementing a new rate plan and modifying an existing rate plan

*          Migrating customers from old plans to more current plans

*          Offering loyalty rewards or discounts

*          Adding or modifying bundles

*          Competitive threats

 

Retention Genie is the new and improved version of Aperio CI’s proven Smart Save solution. It enables contact center agents proactively or reactively ‘save’ customers who are threatening to defect, or have been identified as possible defectors. Retention Genie can be integrated with existing customer care applications with ease.    

 

Retention Genie automatically recalculates bills under all internal and competitor plans. It equips agents with immediate analysis of customer’s usage and how much they would have spent under any internal or competitors’ plan, giving them the confidence to make informed and intelligent offers. 

 

One of the enhanced features of Retention Genie is the “Build a Plan”. It allows agents to quickly build a new plan for the customer based upon the customer’s usage information, including bundles and add-ons. Retention Genie will automatically re-calculate the customer’s most recent three bills on the fly, as the new plan is being built. It displays the difference between what the customer actually spent on their current plan with what they would have spent on the new plan. 

 

The Visual Bill Manager is a Web-based solution that enables customers: consumers, SME and corporate users alike manage service usage through the swift delivery of on-line reports available soon after the billing cycle is complete. These reports enable users to quickly analyze usage and total spend on services. Aperio CI has enhanced it with features including:

 

*          Unbilled Usage, which enables the customer to view how much of their bundles they have used to date in order to avoid overages

*          Bill Image, which permits the customer to view their actual bill online. They can also download and print their bills

 

Visual Bill Manager was built to assist companies with the dreaded and time-consuming task of building their own reports in order to analyze usage data. Aperio CI’s Visual Bill Manager eliminates the need to manually build and customize a report every time someone wants to see the data in a different way. All users need to do is simply build the report within Visual Bill Manager, run the report and a link to the report is delivered within minutes into their inbox. 

 

“From our long expertise in pricing and analytics, we saw a growing need for operators to easily and effectively manage and measure the impact of plan changes on their customer base,” says Duffy Mich, Aperio CI chief executive officer. “Pricing Genie gives operators the ability to quickly and accurately measure that impact and enables them to effectively market the right plans and offers to the right customers, resulting in greater brand loyalty and lower churn rates. Clients that implement Retention Genie almost immediately enjoy a reduction in churn without giving away the store. It integrates the client’s business rules to guide real-time offer management, eliminating the expensive “give away the store” theory, in order to save a customer.”

 

“Our clients who use Visual Bill Manager give credit to the solution for the high retention rates they experience with their corporate and SME customers. Visual Bill Manager is a solution that corporate and SMEs do not want to give up once they’ve started using it. They know that if they switch to another provider, they will lose access to this valuable tool.”