Sybase is taking its CeBS suite of applications to Africa, following its international launch earlier this year.
[VIDEO]Sybase Communications e-Business Solution (CeBS) is a suite of applications specific to the communications industry built on top of Sybase's e-business platform. The solution effectively addresses the last bastion of non-automated processes in the telecommunications industry, changing the business dynamic at the point of customer interaction.
The result is improved customer satisfaction; reduced customer churn; increased opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling; and the ability for communications service providers (CSPs), who are all essentially selling the same commoditised products, to differentiate themselves from competitors based on customer service rather than merely on price.
"CeBs is an exciting new offering from Sybase that offers a vertical portal solution to enable telecommunications companies to have better analytical data about their subscribers, as well as offer the subscriber base advanced self-service," says Julie Tomlinson, sales and marketing manager for Sybase SA. "These are both important features to add competitive advantage to the telco, which is critical in today's hostile environment. Sybase SA believes that the solution has great potential in southern Africa and further north in Africa to assist telcos to become more customer-centric, something which consumers are demanding."
[VIDEO]CeBS essentially enables self-service over the Web so customers can avoid "call centre syndrome" altogether. It also enables call centre agents to handle multiple customer questions and issues in a single call by allowing them to quickly access a customer's account information, regardless of where it resides in the CSP's back-end operational systems.
CeBS also offers a business intelligence component that allows carriers and their channel partners to analyse business performance and campaigns; analyse acquisition, churn and retention data; and act on the data they have collected to create new products or product bundles or to target specific customers or customer groups based on the profitability of their business to the carrier. Another important CeBS differentiator is its open architecture, integrating with back-office systems running solutions such as Oracle, IBM or Sybase.
[VIDEO]Chris Twyman, product marketing manager for CeBS in Europe, visited SA last week to outline the advantages of the solution for Africa. While CeBS is specifically suited to telecommunications providers, Twyman points out that its basic principles can be used in any major service industry.
"From the CSP's point of view, CeBS reduces customer service costs while improving the quality of customer service and employee productivity."
Twyman cites one example in which Europe's largest network-independent telecommunications company introduced CeBS in its three call centres with a view to improving efficiency. He says the company expects to increase efficiency by 67% to see the CeBS solution paying for itself in four months.
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