Southern Phone – Website Redevelopment / Customer Acquisition Management / Collections Management System

“Southern Phone has found the responsiveness and speed of Intergy’s work refreshing. With their help we have been able to implement major process improvements that will deliver significant benefits to the bottom line.”

Southern Phone delivers affordable telecommunications services with a strong focus on regional Australia. Southern Phone and is owned by over 40 local councils. The headquarters and principal place of business is in the regional centre of Moruya in the Eurobodalla Shire on the NSW south coast.

Intergy was originally engaged to redevelop the Southern Phone external website and online Customer Service system. As Intergy proved its professionalism and responsiveness consistently over time, Southern Phone also asked Intergy to undertake the development of two other major internal management systems, their Customer Acquisition Management (CAM) system and their Collections Management System (CMS). All these systems are described below.

Website Redevelopment

Intergy used its in-house graphic designers to completely redesign the existing website with Southern Phone’s new logo and an updated professional look – using layout, smart colours, and easy navigation. We have also added a home page flash that ties in with their TV advertising campaign. Our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant performed on page optimisation to make sure the website meets the search engine standards.

Customer Acquisition Management

Intergy developed a Customer Acquisition Management system (CAM) to track all new customers, interface with Veda’s DecisionLink for credit checking, and load the records into the existing billing system used by Southern Phone. Sales representatives are able to add new customer details and the services they require. They also can edit existing customers to add/remove services or change their communication/plan details.

A work flow model is implemented to automate the process of adding Customers/Services. The system processes the predefined work flow and communicates with third party web services to perform realtime credit checking and load into the billing system. The system keeps track of Customer and Service process history for easy management. This automation helps the sales representatives to complete the sale with relatively few mouse clicks. The CAM system also includes User Management and various management reports to monitor Sales and Provisioning.

Collections Management System

As with most large businesses, not everyone pays on time, so each month Southern Phone staff (Agents) are provided with call lists to contact those customers with outstanding balances. Agents often make payment arrangements with customers they contact. Call lists for Agents are manually created at beginning of each monthly cycle. Intergy helped Southern Phone to automate the management of these tasks.

Intergy developed a system that streamlines tasks such as creating and allocating call lists, recording and monitoring customer payment arrangements, and reporting on the effectiveness of the collections activities. Admin users can upload Aged Debtors reports (from the billing system) to the collections system to produce the call lists and assign to the Agents automatically using the sharing mechanism between the available Agents list. Every agent has their own login which is used to record the contact made with the customer and the payment arrangements put in place. Search functionalities are available to the Agents to search customers in collections based on contact made, arrangement made, arrangement kept etc. Admin users can also upload payment reports into the system to automatically check which customers have kept their arrangement based on the arrangements made, and when payments come in and for how much. Other reports in the system help the senior management to monitor customer payments arrangements and overall effectiveness of collection activities.

Technology Used

The web application and user interface was developed in PHP technologies using CodeIgniter framework. A MySQL database was used for data storage and retrieval.