Lisa Everitt

AT&T Wireless hopes that partnering with NTT DoCoMo will help it vault over competitors in the next hot mobile arena: the wireless Web. The mergers that created Verizon Wireless and Cingular Wireless dislodged AT&T from its place at the top of the wireless heap. But with roughly $10.5 billion in revenue last year, up nearly […]

Only about 20 percent of companies actually use the data they collect from online interactions to improve how they serve their customers. “Most companies are missing the opportunity,” says Dave Daniels, a Jupiter Media Metrix analyst and author of a recent survey examining the business-to-business customer service. He says that integration hassles represent the biggest […]

Customer service is like the weather: everybody likes to talk about it, but nobody seems to be able to do anything about it. Despite innovations in customer care and electronic billing and payment, most companies interact with their customer base just as they did 20 years ago. The customer calls to place an order, the […]

Two billing service providers have staked out turf on opposite coasts and opposite ends of the customer continuum. San Jose-based eBillit focuses on the smallest customers: households without credit cards, and consumers who wont entrust their credit-card numbers to the Internet. Inforonics of Littleton, Mass., focuses on the largest customers: corporations that want to combine […]

These are the things they carried away: The e-mail log-in. The door card. The voice-mail passwords. The cell phone, Palm and laptop. Stuff from their last employer that somehow got — ahem — overlooked during the exit interview. Business Layers, a 2-year-old company in Rochelle Park, N.J., sells applications that enable systematic and fast provisioning […]

In the world of service provisioning, impatience is a virtue. “We live in a world where were not ready to wait for anything,” says Russell Rothstein at HarmonyCom, an automated provisioning software developer in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Today, the average time to provision an order for broadband ser- vice is four to six weeks, or […]

By the time you read this, turmoil at British Telecommunications may have cost CEO Sir Peter Bonfield his job. Last November, when Bonfield detailed the second phase of BTs restructuring, he predicted “radical change” for the carrier, which posted $29.5 billion in revenue in financial year 2001. Did the change he envisioned include a new […]

If, in a year, you can get instant messages on your dental fillings, dont say we didnt warn you. At 23.2 million subscribers, America Online is the worlds largest Internet service provider. Add to that figure ICQ users, CompuServe Interactive Services users, Netscape Communications registrants and millions of hits on Digital City, MapQuest, etc. With […]

Formed by the $3.4 billion merger of Concentric Network and Nextlink Communications, XO Communications is building a local and long-distance network, plus copper and fixed wireless in the local loop. The XO business model, as envisioned by CEO Dan Akerson: Build and operate your own network — 60 metro markets plus 24 fibers on Level […]

AT&T doesnt really want to talk about long-distance, which seems odd. The company remains No. 1 in the dog-eat-dog consumer business, with 60 million customers and the best profit margins among major carriers. And long-distance made up half of its $18.9 billion revenue. But Wall Street sees “long-distance” and shudders. In the companys annual report, […]