A competitive local exchange carrier operating in 19 markets within the U.S. will use Saville Systems' Convergent Billing Platform to turn its monthly bills into opportunities to build loyalty among its business customers.

Time Warner Communications will use Saville's CBP as a turnkey system to bill for its local business switched phone services, allowing the company to rapidly improve its customer care and service capabilities, improve cost-effectiveness of operations and develop new products.

"Essentially, the CBP system provides us with a soup-to-nuts billing solution," said Bob Meldrum, director of marketing and communications at Time Warner Communications. "It gave us a solution that could adapt as our services grow and that Saville helped us to get in place quickly."

Through its facilities management service, Saville will remotely manage the back-end functions of CBP--bill and report generation as well as accounts receivable--for Time Warner, "releasing them from the headaches of managing the system," said John Hart, vice president of marketing at Burlington, Mass.-based Saville.

"A company in Time Warner's position--a new company with plans to rapidly grow its services and markets--means they don't have time to devote a lot of time up front to learning and implementing the platform," he said. "Under the agreement, Time Warner owns the license, but for the first three years of the agreement we manage the CBP, during which time they can gradually ease into managing the platform themselves."

The CBP is an integrated system that supports the entire customer care and billing process using modules for customer care, order management, event management, billing and accounts receivable. Through the use of a single platform for all these functions, Time Warner will be able to reduce its operational costs while still providing all the services and products its customers demand.

Time Warner Communications provides switched services for business customers in California, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. This wide geographical distribution requires a flexible platform to cope with regulatory differences from state to state, said Hart.

"The dispersed nature of Time Warner's markets really plays to one of our strengths," he said. "When you have markets that are--as in Time Warner's case--as far as 5000 miles apart, you're going to run up against unique local taxation issues and local requirements. The surcharge for 911 services will be different, for example, or the rules for provisioning may be slightly different. The CBP is flexible enough to match the product mix with the billing requirements that go along with them."

Although Time Warner is using the CBP as a point solution for its CLEC business for now, the platform could to provide a "single bill" capability in the future. Part of Saville's model for putting the CBP into place is the idea that carriers will launch their use of the platform with one or two services and gradually add more service offerings. Saville CBP is designed to scale with a provider's needs.

"If anyone tests the value of a system like this, it's a CLEC," said Hart. "They will exercise the platform to its potential, and hopefully they'll apply it to other services and markets. Time Warner is in a really good position to offer both cable and telephony services, and this platform could help them tie the billing for those services together."