Citizens Communications (News - Alert) Company, which operates under the brand name Frontier, and offers telephone, television, and Internet services in 24 states, has successfully completed the first of two billing system conversions, consolidating more than 465,000 customers onto its primary billing platform. With this, the primary Citizens billing system now supports approximately two million access lines.

 

This significant undertaking enhances the billing and customer care capabilities for 64 markets and included consolidation of plant, inventory, and repair functions. Citizens now has just two billing systems, and the remaining system conversion covering 400,000 access lines is scheduled for completion later this year.

 

“The benefits of these conversions are very significant. In addition to lowering the cost of operations through business process standardization, there will be a meaningful positive effect on customer service,” said CEO Maggie Wilderotter. “Our customers will have a new simplified bill format that is greatly improved over the previous version. The bill was designed with customer input, has multiple color capability and enhanced messaging. These information system consolidations also allow our customer care representatives to be even more effective at selling our products and delivering a great customer experience.”

 

While announcing another major milestone, the company said that it also has signed up its 100,000^th DISH Network Satellite TV customer. The partnership with DISH Network provides several all-digital television packages ranging from 40 to 250 channels, and these packages are added to telephone and broadband services sold and provided by Citizens.

 

As has become common, customers receives a discount for taking all three voice, video, and data services, with Citizens providing the customer service, consolidated billing, and front line support for these products.

 

“Reaching our 100,000^th DISH customer in just three years is a major milestone for Citizens. We have a solid partnership with DISH Network and our customers who take all three services — the Triple Play — have significantly lower churn than all other product offers,” said Wilderotter.