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CSG Systems (News - Alert) is a customer care and billing solutions provider headquartered in Englewood, Colorado. Serving the cable and direct broadcast satellite markets, CSG delivers a suite of solutions designed to help innovative providers of bundled multi-channel video, Internet, voice, and IP-based services rapidly launch new offerings, and provide their customers with the highest possible quality customer experience.

 

Recently CSG announced that Mediacom, a cable company serving 1.4 million U.S. consumers with a triple play bundle of television, Internet and voice services, has extended its contract with the firm through 2014. Mediacom leverages CSG’s Advanced Convergent Platform (ACP) to provide critical customer care and billing services to its customers.

 

I had the opportunity to catch up with CSG Systems’ Director of Customer Care, Chad Dunavant. Dunavant shared his vision for the future and touched on many of the current trends guiding CSG forward in its mission to enable customers to grow by taking advantage of the latest technology-driven solutions.

 

 

CD: CSG Systems International (NASDAQ: CSGS) is a provider of outsourced billing, customer care and print and mail solutions and services supporting the North American cable and direct broadcast satellite markets. Our solutions support some of the world’s largest and most innovative providers of bundled multi-channel video, Internet, voice and IP-based services.

 

 

CD: To enable our clients’ growth with leading business solutions and services that maximize every customer interaction while understanding the business landscape of our customers to effectively introduce new, innovative products and services.

 

CD: Alternative channels for customer care will continue to emerge in 2008. CSG has seen great uptick in two areas specific to alternate channels, which include bill consolidation and Kiosks. Through these initiatives, customers will begin to look at ways to offset traditional customer calls to the call center by allowing them to communicate in various forms. While bill presentment was well adopted in late 2006 and 2007, customer self care and ordering will become the focus in 2008. Through initiatives like Go2Broadband and Retail partnerships, the cable MSOs will look at these alternate channels to not only support current customer activities, but sign up new customers for service.

 

 

CD: Content… content… content. Several interesting trends are beginning to have traditional product extensions attached that make customer adoption more prevalent. In the area of content, consumers can now begin to ‘extend’ much of their PC content (including music, pictures, movies, and time shifted television) to any room in the house. Microsoft (News - Alert) announced the release of the Media Center Extender for the Vista operating system through CE manufacturers like Linksys and HP. In addition, they announced new content partnerships with that will be presented through their online content portion of Media Center. Finally, rounding out the solution for the Media Center, PC manufacturers are beginning to add two-way cable card slots in PCs to support cable card technology. This will allow content to be accessed through the PC acting as a traditional set-top-box. The PC then becomes the central hub, or content database, of all content extending it to each television in the home connected through the aforementioned extender. This, coupled with wireless syncing to devices like the Xbox and Zune, position Microsoft well in the content space.

 

 

CD: To capitalize on both the customer care and content trends we see coming, we are actively growing our product suites. Specific to customer care, we are working on providing ways for consumers to interact with their provider through call center agents, over the Internet, through the set-top box and over wireless devices and in the process, helping our customers better serve consumers in both payment centers and retail locations.

 

We’ve extended our customer self care product, Care Express, to the Kiosk in an integrated module that can be customized for each customer deployment, and we expect to add additional communication channels to further round out that product line. This will include additional integrations to the newly acquired Prairie Systems so things like e-mail communications can be more interactive in nature through targeted messages and notifications.

 

As it relates to content, billing and customer care, we will need to take into account the paradigm shift in content delivery and we will introduce new product extensions to include robust customer profile management, e-wallet, real-time product configuration and publication, and enhanced order management and provisioning capabilities. CSG is enhancing both its core billing platform (ACP) and introducing a new content product line (Content Direct) to address some of these immediate opportunities.