Business software provider CSG acquired order management company DGIT for an undisclosed sum, in a move designed to improve its ability to help operators roll out and process orders for new enterprise offerings.
Chad Dunavant, CSG’s Chief Strategy and Product Officer, told Fierce the company already has systems in place to handle back-office billing, retail, B2C and wholesale use cases for wireline and wireless operators. The addition of DGIT will flesh out its portfolio with advanced “configure, price, quote” (CPQ) capabilities that can support the increasingly complex B2B offers operators are deploying, he said.
Though CSG historically worked with other CPQ vendors on a deal-by-deal basis, Dunavant said it discovered many lacked the ability to adequately support the needs of telecoms in the enterprise segment.
He explained B2C engagements with customers are pretty straightforward. Consumers select from a fixed menu of services and generally don’t engage in a deep negotiation with the operator over the services they’re going to buy. That’s not true of the B2B space, where custom quotes for enterprise customers are common.
RELATED: Shentel targets field service efficiencies as it pushes fiber to 300k homes
“Think about a building manager that’s building a high-rise and they call AT&T or they call Verizon and want a quote for a fiber lay to the premise and then they want backup through a generator service and then they want guaranteed service levels for different floors based on their tenants,” Dunavant said. “They can really get complex.”
With things like cloud services and network slicing on the horizon, things are only going to get more complicated, he added. DGIT's technology will allow CSG to automate what is very much a manual quote process today.
Karl Whitelock, research VP for communications service provider operations and monetization at IDC, said in a statement “As the market places greater focus on B2B and B2B2x service models, robust CPQ and order management solutions can greatly reduce provisioning and billing errors, which are two of the leading causes of customer dissatisfaction for communications service providers today.”
Dunavant noted that over the next three months or so, CSG will work to incorporate the DGIT team and products into its operations. Within the same timeframe it will “be coming to market with a new brand launch around this integrated offering, really focused on the B2B2X segment and the value propositions that are around it,” he concluded.