HOT SPRINGS, Va.--Business customers may not be aware of the facilities that independent rural telcos can offer them, but they will be wooed by the level of customer service they get, a panel of speakers said today at the 43rd Annual Organization for the Protection and Advancement of Small Telephone Companies Summer Conference and Trade Show.

The most important thing that ILECs can do is be aggressive in going after business customers, including those outside their franchise territory, said Glenn McFadden, executive vice president of Comporium Communications, an ILEC in South Carolina.

“Our destiny is in our own hands,” he said. “If you have quality products and services, you can win the business. It’s easy to beat the big guys --they make it easy--but you have to get aggressive in going after businesses.”

ILECs can capitalize on cutbacks made by bigger service providers and provide a level of service that businesses can no longer get elsewhere, said Paul Waits, president of Ritter Communications Holding, an ILEC that opened a CLEC operation in Jonesboro, Ark.

“AT&T has been retreating through their ‘right-sizing,’” he said. “Different departments are being pulled back to San Antonio or other places--they aren’t in Jonesboro. We went in, literally, offering to clean up the mess. We are integrated and consultant--there is no [network interface device] for our customers because we do it all--the phones, the computers, the networks-- they have one company to call.”

The primary appeal, however, is that Ritter is local, Waits said.

“These folks want to do business with someone local, someone they could talk to, someone who answers the phone. We are the disruptor, not the disruptee, and we differentiate on service.”

Ritter has been able to land both Jonesboro’s largest employer, the local medical center, and a major contract with a new mall in the area.

Similarly, Comporium won a major contract with Pulte Homes, a Del Web community, which was building a major development, Sun City Carolina Lakes. While Pulte had traditionally dealt with larger providers such as Verizon or Time-Warner Cable, Comporium was able to convince the company to let it do all the wiring, as well as the home integration, and provide a six-pack of services--voice, high-speed data, cable TV, security, wireless and home integration that extended to providing plasma TVs.

“Some things will always be true,” said McFadden. “We are dependable and reliable. We always wore coats and ties to every meeting, we were always on time. We delivered our bid in person a day early. Every time there was more information required, we made sure we were on time. And our proposal was knock-you-dead quality.”

Jaguar Communications of Minnesota is actually a CLEC, not an ILEC, but as a small company, it behaves very similarly to an independent telco, said CEO Donny Smith. The company got started to bring next-generation services to communities that are being overlooked, he added.

“We don’t compete on price,” Smith said. “We have the most expensive lines in rural Minnesota, but we are saving [our customers] money, because of all the add-on fees that the telephone companies don’t talk about.”

Jaguar also differentiates itself on service, answering the phone and providing a dedicated point of contact, as well as customized products.

Small telcos are doing this across the country, said Steve Moore, Comporium vice president, who outlined case study after case study where independents landed big customers by providing a higher quality of service including bills that are easier to understand, and more accurate.

A survey of corporate telecom managers by the Minnesota Telecommunications Association, an organization of large telecom users, shows that while 71% of those surveyed said they need rural services and half were willing to use a rural provider, many had the misperception that ILEC networks are out-of-date, said Becky Ames, client relations manager at MACC.

“There is a huge information gap,” she said. “You need to overcome that by telling [businesses] what kind of services you have available. You don’t need to make a lot of changes, but you need to overcome that perception.”