Yak America dba Spot Talk has selected Profitec Billing Services, Inc., as its billing and software development partner.
We are all pleased to welcome Spot Talk on board. The challenging nature of the implementation and the products and services make this a very rewarding assignment,” says Randy Minervino, Profitec’s Vice President of Sales & marketing
“Our product mix is very comprehensive, and our billing requirements are complex,” says Steve Kerr, Yak America’s VP of Network Operations. “We offer a large mix of communications products. When we decided to replace our legacy billing platform we started to research the marketplace. A short search brought us to Profitec. As it happens they were already doing business with one of our other business units, and because they were a known commodity we took a closer look at all of their newest capabilities. The products met our requirements and we were intrigued by the full scope of their organizational support systems that surround their core billing application.”
“Spot Talk needed to convert a database of over 300,000 accounts while at the same time moving to a new invoice look and a new name brand identity,” states Spot Talks, Steve Kerr. “Profitec’s staff was able to work with our experts to quickly accomplish some very large tasks. Working together the database was converted efficiently and expeditiously. Profitec’s developers were able to produce a phased invoice design, which initially closely resembled our existing invoice in a co-branding scenario, and then transitioned to our final invoice delivery with a single brand. Profitec’s in-house print facility was also vital in support of the scale of our operation. We do daily bill runs for thousands of customers, and we needed to select a partner that had the production resources and the print capacity to handle our business.”
“This has been a large conversion with multiple cycles, product sets, rate decks, and service offerings,” says Ian Secord, Profitec’s Director of Billing Operations. “The database was converted, invoice work was done and the first bills were rolling out approximately 60 days from the start of the relationship. Spot Talk was able to move rapidly to make decisions and handle challenges that arise as part of the conversion process. Spot Talk assigned a designated team which helps make our task far easier.”
The relationship requires more than just a billing solution. All of the services are supported on Spot Talk’s Genband platform. “We wanted a vendor who could provide web-based support systems to facilitate business operations in addition to billing”, states Kerr. “In order to expedite delivery of our newest products we needed support for our consumer portals and real-time activations and other order management functions. Profitec gives us all that. Our services can be provisioned and billed quickly reducing the time to revenue for new accounts. While billing was a key factor in driving our decision-making, it was the additional capabilities offered through Profitec’s greater OmniSuite offering which provided the opportunity for us. We wanted to move very quickly and we wanted to take advantage of the significant web presence that we have established and the development efforts we put forth in the areas of customer self-care and self-initiation. While Profitec offers several portal products as part of its OmniSuite, their ability to allow us to interface our applications to the billing database through their real-time web service was a key factor in our decision-making process. Our collective capabilities allow us to automate every step from the time end-user signs up for service to the point at which the service is activated on our platform.”
Profitec Billing Services, Inc. is a Wallingford, Connecticut-based billing and back-office services provider which designs and develops its own proprietary line of OSS/BSS applications. Profitec is a family-owned and operated company that has been serving communications marketers since 1986.
More information on Spot Talk can be acquired at www.SpotTalk.net.