The Client

Founded in 1973 as a cable television operator with 1,500 Long Island customers, Cablevision currently operates the nation's single biggest cable cluster, serving 3 million households in the New York metropolitan area. Cablevision's fiber-optic coaxial network provides the framework for this extensive service area. This state-of-the-art system also enables the company to expand beyond traditional video services, connecting customers to advanced, customized communications products, including Cablevision's iO: Interactive Optimum unprecedented suite of digital services, its Optimum Online high-speed Internet access and its Lightpath integrated business telecommunications services.

The Business Challenge

Cablevision's eMedia group provides and manages the Internet channels to drive sales of the high-speed Internet access service, Optimum Online, digital cable service, iO Interactive Optimum, and voice service, Optimum Voice. This channel provides service related information, order capture and order processing workflow for both soft and hard goods. The applications were developed to be flexible to meet the changing needs of the business, provide an open architecture to ease the effort of integration with legacy systems and support rapid development and release of new features. The system users include:

• Consumers: This is the group of users that the business is targeting for services. The public websites provide service information such as pricing and service availability, promotional content and allows Cablevision customers to order services and products (modems) from the site.
• Telemarketers: This UI supports the Telemarketers in entering orders from Inbound and Outbound sales calls and managing the customer leads database. Customers who do not have Internet access, do not have Cablevision service or simply need more help can contact the Telemarketing team to order Cablevision's services.
• Billing: The billing interface provides the ability to approve consumer-entered orders. Customer account data is used to streamline the approval process.
• Logistics: This interface is used to print packing slips for approved orders, assign and track inventory (cable modems, NICs and starter kits) and record the UPS shipping information.
  

To support the customer's requirements for a successful site, the applications provide the business users with:

• The ability to provide customization and target content to each customer segment.
• The ability to manage marketing campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness to deliver and tailor services effectively.
• The ability to control workflow and monitor order progression from entry through fulfillment.

In implementing the solution, McFadyen leveraged ATG's Personalization and Scenarios, ensuring the proper framework is in place to empower the business owner. ATG Targeters and other ATG concepts were used to allow the business user to deliver their message to their target audience while providing value and improving the relationship between Cablevision and their customers.

The challenge in the Cablevision web-personalization/e-commerce project is the ability to target already existing user base in order to be able to provide them with services in a quick and efficient manner. The challenge was also to be able to retain the existing user base from the previously existing application which was no longer able to take advantage of the same user base with different service offerings. The additional challenge was the ability to create "Back Office Administration", BOA, of the site to be able to create, review and modify existing orders. The primary work force is the floating base of telemarketing workforce and this requires administering users and assigning different roles at any given time in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

The Return on Investment

The greatest return on investment for Cablevision is the ability for the users and the workforce to create the orders for cable modems and digital set top boxes. The system is integrated to have a single catalog for different sites like optimumOnline, which sells the cable modems, optimumInteractive which sells digital set top boxes and optimumVoice which hopes to sell the equipment for Voice over IP hardware. The site also provides the ability to manage inventory, users, and analyze the sales easily at one place. The site also allows leveraging the technology to be able to create promotions easily and track their effectiveness. The application server for the 4 different sites is the same and hence makes it easy to be able to cross-sell and up-sell different services offerings.

The Technology

The site is developed entirely in Java through different formhandlers and Java beans. The site leverages all that the underlying framework of ATG Dynamo has to offer. This makes the site secure, robust and highly scalable. The system serves the content for the three different sites along with the ability to version and manage this content as a part of the functionality of the system. The chief e-commerce piece in this project is more along the lines of a b2b model where the customer places an order and this order is put into a workflow which culminates in fulfillment of the order.