Australia?s Third Largest Carrier, to Use Talgentra?s Customer Revenue Management System

AAPT today announced that it has chosen Talgentra’s customer revenue management and collection system to manage customers in arrears and collect on unpaid bills. The use of Talgentra’s Tallyman system will significantly improve AAPT’s bottom line by collecting revenue that would otherwise have been written off. Tallyman will also limit manual processes and thus reduce the operating costs of AAPT’s collections department.

AAPT is Australia’s third largest telecommunications carrier offering a range of local and long distance voice, mobile, data and Internet services to residential, business, government and wholesale customers.

In an initial contract valued at UK£800,000 ($1.4 million), Talgentra’s flagship Tallyman system will replace AAPT’s current proprietary collections system, with an estimated go-live date of Q4 2006. Tallyman will be fully integrated with a new provisioning and billing system also being rolled out by AAPT, which forms part of the major transformational program announced by AAPT in 2005. This now places Talgentra as a key partner to AAPT in this major programme that will be developed and deployed over the next 12 months. Simon Bligh, CFO of AAPT, said: “In today’s competitive market, we need to make sure that we are doing everything possible to collect monies due from customers more efficiently. However, our experience and expertise in collections was being limited by our legacy systems. The flexibility and strength of Talgentra’s Tallyman system will really allow us to innovate and continue to grow our competitive advantage in credit collections. Tallyman came highly recommended to us by other telcos already successfully using it to reduce write-offs. To date we have found that Talgentra have been indeed as straightforward and easy to work with as we were promised.

“We are very enthusiastic with the partnership we have undertaken with Talgentra and are looking forward to a long term relationship with them. We will continue to innovate and challenge convention in credit collections which is a key reason we chose Tallyman.”

Tallyman is already being used by a number of operators around the world including SingTel in Singapore, Vodafone in Australia and New Zealand, Maxis in Malaysia and Tata Indicom in India.

The Tallyman customer revenue management and collection system automates the collections process by consolidating all credit-related communications, including phone calls, emails, texts, letters and faxes between an organisation and its customer into a single database. As such, Tallyman will now be the main source of information for AAPT’s collections agents, providing accurate, up-to-the-minute data.

Tallyman will also enable AAPT to segment customers in arrears in the same way that marketing departments can segment customers and prospects using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. This will allow AAPT to adopt a far more targeted and personalised approach to debt collection. For example, an established customer who usually settles bills on time will not be treated in the same way as a new customer who defaults on their very first payment. Specifically, Tallyman will enable AAPT to benefit from:

• Reduced operating costs from more efficient management of the expanding collections workload.
• An efficient debt management system that handles debt in a timely manner with limited risk from manual errors.
• Reduced debts and write-offs due to managing debt earlier.
• Improved customer service and management of customer contracts.
• Automation of many of the collections processes such as SMS reminders.

Brian Dewis, CEO of Talgentra, said: “For far too long, the telecoms industry has tried to recover monies owed by relying on traditional mail and phone techniques followed by contract cancellation and disconnection. This approach is becoming untenable – in a deregulated market and with mobile phones often replacing fixed lines, the threat of disconnection is no longer as strong as it was. It is easier than ever before for customers to switch between providers, leaving a trail of debt in their wake. Companies who implement specialist customer revenue management and collection systems report significantly improved cash flow, reduced debt write-off, improved productivity and stronger customer relations – with return on investment typically achieved in less than 12 months.”

About AAPT
AAPT is Australia’s third largest telecommunications carrier and is 100% owned by Telecom New Zealand, New Zealand’s largest listed company and one of the top 20 largest listed companies on the Australian Stock Exchange It offers a range of local and long distance voice, mobile, data and Internet services to residential, business, government and wholesale customers.