Service provider marketing groups devise campaigns and programs to increase awareness, gain market share, or reduce churn for a particular product or bundle of products. How creative marketing groups are with their campaigns and programs is in part a function of how much the back-office systems will allow them to do- in the necessary timeframe.

Marketing Program Manager (MPM) provides an effective tool for marketing groups to track specific marketing programs (such as a program to reduce churn), manage CPE fulfillment (such as Caller ID boxes), generate customer lists for direct mail programs, and determine eligibility for program awards or certificate distribution. MPM tracks all product sales, over the life of the sale, and provides reports that can be accessed via the Internet from any browser.

MPM accepts service orders directly from operational databases, interprets the service orders, and enters the information into a database for further processing and tracking. ServiceSPAN's experiences with legacy systems allows MPM to easily interface with a direct service order feed from a Service Provider, or accept files sent via File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

Files based on service provider parameters can be sent to fulfillment houses for delivery of CPE or other types of fulfillment. MPM tracks the fulfillment transactions and can extend to the fulfillment house help desk, facilitating a quick and complete resolution to subscriber inquiries.

Detailed, customized reports, accessible from any browser, provide marketing groups with daily, weekly, and monthly tracking of targeted product sales in addition to complementary product sales. Sales by center as well as representative are also available.

"In an effort to avoid costs we tend to do things manually which, introduces a variability to the quality of the output."

"Each program, campaign, or contest we run requires a lengthy requirements gathering interval. We lose precious time to this process."

"Our current process is inflexible to requirements changes once the program has started. Effectively, we must stop, reconfigure, and restart the program if requirements change."

"Once a file is given to our fulfillment house we have little ability to track and resolve subscriber inquiries. We need to be aware of the current status of each step in the process."

"Trends, good or bad, tend to be identified too late for us to take advantage of or administer corrective action."

• Reducing the time-to-market for program/campaign introduction by providing a flexible environment for communicating eligibility requirements

• Identifying trends that may otherwise go unnoticed. For example, if a particular sales office has an unusually high rate of churn; Marketing Program Manager can drill down to the individual representative level and provide detailed information to the product manager

• Providing comprehensive customized detailed reports, which are accessible over the Internet from any browser

• Implementing a "closed-loop" process for interacting with fulfillment houses including making MPM help desk software extensible to fulfillment house

• Archiving service order activity for use in churn management programs