BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Lavastorm Analytics, a leading global analytics software company, announced today that two major communications service providers (CSPs) have licensed the company’s bill analysis products, including Lavastorm Spend Analyzer, a sophisticated e-billing and analytics application which lets CSPs offer their business customers a self-service bill analysis environment which provides a consolidated view of services they consume and the analytic capabilities to monitor and optimize their usage and spend.

“So products and services that can strengthen the relationship between the business customer and the CSP are critical to continued CSP profitability. E-billing and Big Data-driven analytics services can help CSPs differentiate their value on traditional voice services while encouraging the use of newer digital services.”

“Business customers are quite lucrative for CSPs due to the volume and variety of services they acquire,” said Jeff Cotrupe, Global Program Director, Big Data & Analytics (BDA), Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan. “So products and services that can strengthen the relationship between the business customer and the CSP are critical to continued CSP profitability. E-billing and Big Data-driven analytics services can help CSPs differentiate their value on traditional voice services while encouraging the use of newer digital services.”

Spend Analyzer, which is now available as an on-premise solution, uses a unique composite application approach that allows the CSP to cost-effectively deploy e-billing and analytic capabilities for their business customers. The composite application approach leaves underlying billing systems untouched, but adds a flexible analytic layer that can be rapidly configured to add new analytic capabilities not present in the underlying billing systems. Without changing the underlying billing systems, Spend Analyzer consolidates billing data from the CSPs’ billing systems, even if the CSP has different billing systems for different geographies or services, and publishes out-of-the-box web-based reports that can be configured to the unique needs of each business customer. This consolidated view of the customer-CSP relationship can also be accessed by the CSPs’ internal teams so front-line groups, such as customer service and sales, are better equipped to address customer inquiries.

Providing business customers with greater visibility into the customer-CSP relationship and putting greater analytic power in a business customer’s hands improves the customer experience. This is done by reducing the number of billing calls to the customer service organization and providing analytic services that differentiate the CSP’s services and increase loyalty and long-term customer value.

Spend Analyzer includes the following key features:

• Electronic bill presentment – Spend Analyzer is an important part of cost control and green initiatives because it reduces the need for paper bills.
• Consolidated e-bill and analysis dashboard – Business customers gain a holistic Web-based view of spend across services, at any level of the organization and for multiple time periods
• Self-service analytics environment – Self-service tools let customers answer questions about their bills, reducing inbound inquiries, accelerating payments and reducing days sales outstanding (DSO).
• Analysis by customer-defined reporting structures – Spend Analyzer presents business customers with spend data in a way that reflects their unique organizational structure and allows customers to dynamically modify the presentation to accommodate temporary project structures or agile organizational models.
• Scheduled and custom reporting – Comprehensive reporting capabilities allow business customers to leverage out-of-the-box reports to analyze usage and billing data by time period, individual user or organizational group; or easily create custom reports that they can then turn them into scheduled reports that streamline the report-generation process.
• Watchpoints and alerts – Users can configure custom budget thresholds to proactively track usage and spend.
• Provider branding – Spend Analyzer can be configured to reinforce the brand of the service provider, making it a differentiating, value-added service.

“Leading CSPs around the world are focused on building sticky, deep relationships with the highly valuable business segment. Putting analytic power in the hands of their high-value customers both reduces billing and customer service costs, and perhaps most importantly, reduces churn, by creating a deeper and more transparent relationship with this critical segment,” said Drew Rockwell, CEO of Lavastorm Analytics. “This functionality can be delivered quickly without risky changes to the underlying billing systems.”

For more information on Lavastorm Analytics and how Spend Analyzer can help CSPs improve their e-billing and customer experience, visit http://www.lavastorm.com/products/applications/spend-analyzer/.

To see how Lavastorm enables self-service analytics for other areas of business analysts’ organizations, a free public desktop version of Lavastorm Analytics Engine is available for download at http://www.lavastorm.com/products/analytics-engine/comparison-table/.

Tags: Lavastorm Analytics, Spend Analyzer, E-Billing, Customer Service, Communications Service Providers, Data Analytics, Data Analytics, Data Discovery, Business Intelligence, BI, Agile, Agile BI, Agile Analytics, Analytics

About Lavastorm Analytics

Lavastorm Analytics transforms how companies tackle data challenges to achieve breakthrough business results. The company’s agile data management and analytic software gives analysts new powers to harness explosive data complexity, discover new insights and continuously improve business results. Analytics built in Lavastorm provide analysts with exceptional self-sufficiency, agility, transparency, accuracy, and business control. Lavastorm’s solutions have identified business improvements worth billions of dollars for some of the largest corporations in the world. For more information, please visit: www.lavastorm.com.