Playing Catch-Up with the Competition

When AT&T Wireless began its Siebel CRM system upgrade in 2003, it was a company that had slipped from unquestioned market leader to middle of the pack. Its overall market share had slid from an industry-leading 25 percent at the end of 2001 to 17 percent in 2003, third behind Verizon and Cingular.

Worse, AT&T Wireless was playing catch-up on its most important technology asset, its phone network. One of the older wireless companies, AT&T Wireless made an early bet on a technology called TDMA that could not handle data transfer over mobile phones - the next big thing for business customers. Even before AT&T Wireless was spun out from its parent AT&T in 2001, it had begun a furious buildout of an expensive new network - global system for mobile communications, or GSM - that could not only handle data but had the added advantage of global compatibility with overseas providers. Only one other major carrier, Cingular, was saddled with the challenge of building out a new GSM network while still servicing the old one. The other carriers had all chosen network technologies that could handle data transfers.

GSM was a great opportunity for AT&T Wireless, but it was also a huge CRM challenge. The company had to convince its old customers to move off TDMA, which worked as well as most other carriers' networks for voice calls, and onto GSM, which had poorer voice quality, according to Morgan Stanley. It also had to convince new customers that GSM was the wave of the future, that they would soon be shipping data over their phones instead of their laptops. But customers didn't buy the pitch. By 2003, AT&T Wireless's percentage of customers on GSM was hovering at 15 percent, according to analysts, while Cingular had 35 percent of its customers moved over (thanks, in part, to its acquisition of a mobile provider with an existing GSM network). And things weren't improving. In the third quarter of 2003, less than half of AT&T Wireless's new customers were choosing GSM, while Cingular was signing up 75 percent, according to Morgan Stanley.

Everyone at AT&T Wireless agreed that the company would keep its existing customers and add more new ones if its customer representatives could handle more calls and get customers up and running faster. Customer service representatives needed about 20 minutes, on average, to work through five or six screens that fetched information from about 15 legacy systems, say former employees. Slow access to customer information records was just one of the reasons why AT&T Wireless possessed the second-highest cost per subscriber (behind Sprint PCS) of the top six US carriers in 2003, according to financial services company UBS.

Why AT&T Needed to Upgrade

AT&T Wireless installed Siebel's CRM system in 2001 to be the front end of its customer service process. The back end, however, was a complex mishmash of systems, say former employees. Telco billing systems, for example, were stuffed full of different rate plans and arcane metering processes. Systems that tracked calls and set up new phone numbers (provisioning) communicated with hundreds of thousands of different telephone switches around the US and the world. To work for AT&T Wireless, Siebel's version 6 had to be highly customized. Though the software came with integration tools, consultants usually resorted to writing point-to-point scripts to hook the systems together. Policing the overall integration in a scenario like this is difficult at best. Indeed, a former AT&T Wireless employee who worked on the project recalls the test system crashing and remaining down for six weeks during the northern summer of 2002 when AT&T Wireless began preparing Siebel version 6 to deal with number portability. And when S Siebel 6 was finally up and running, it still couldn't handle all the information that customer service representatives needed.

The next release of Siebel, version 7, was much more powerful. Siebel developed an industry-specific version of the new software that had many more features and could capture more telco-specific information. And new Web capabilities meant that AT&T Wireless could potentially reduce the number of customer service screens to one by building a Web portal that put all the different systems and information sources together in one place. "That was the point of the upgrade," says a former employee. "They wanted to get everything on one screen so they could sign up customers faster."

Marc Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T Wireless, agrees: "As we needed to handle more transactions, more customers, we needed a more robust system. So we upgraded. [The upgrade] was going to make it easier for our representatives to get access to information and give them a fuller array of information on the customer."

In the northern spring of 2003, the company decided to upgrade to version 7.5 for the roughly 3 million customers on the GSM and general packet radio service (the data portion of the new network). TDMA customers would continue to be serviced through AT&T Wireless's legacy Axys CRM system until they could be moved over to GSM and the new Siebel system. The project was called Odyssey.