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TeleBright Offers Unbiased Support
Posted June 21, 2000
By Lori Allen
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CAPITALIZING ON THE boom in online telecom purchasing, TeleBright.com (Rockville, Md.) has launched a new Web site that promises to offer free, live telecom support to help small businesses decide on low-cost, customized services from more than 35 national, international and regional service providers, including special offers on new digital subscriber line (DSL) service.
According to company spokesmen, the site provides customization tools for "apples-to-apples" comparison shopping with independent auditor verification of neutrality. TeleBright.com is currently negotiating to have an independent auditing firm analyze its technology and comparison-shopping engine to further its claims of neutrality.
TeleBright.com's proprietary IntelliRate technology produces customized results that list plans from least expensive to most expensive, allowing real-time, side-by-side comparisons of telecom services including long distance, wireless, international calling, local service, Internet dial-up, DSL, T1 and Web hosting, according to the company. Additional service offerings planned for the future include wireless Internet, cable and direct satellite, frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), Internet protocol (IP), time-division multiplexing (TDM), networking and outsourced applications for small businesses, it said.
"Service providers benefit in three ways: One is by cutting sales costs, which can sometimes go as high as 16 percent of a product price. By providing their services through a medium like us, providers can save on the cost of selling their service. A second benefit is the fact that customers who log on to the site are people who are actually looking to buy, so all the pre-sale issues are moot because these people want to buy a service plan. The third benefit is the time it takes to get the decision made. In this case, the customer looks at the comparison, likes the price and makes the decision. The amount of time involved in the decision process gets cut down," said Chet Thaker, CEO and founder of TeleBright.com.
Time to market is also an issue. "If providers were to create a new promotion or a new plan that they want to introduce, when they share it with us it gets instantly made available to the market," Thaker said.
Participating TeleBright.com service providers include, among others, AirTouch, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Broadwing Communications, Cellular One, Covad, Global Crossing, GTE, MCI WorldCom, Northpoint, OneStar, PSINet, Qwest, RCN, Rhythms, Sprint, Telares, Teligent and TTI.
Small businesses can purchase their choices directly from the TeleBright.com site or by calling an 800 number to receive additional support rather than submitting requests for proposal (RFPs) and waiting for a response. Once the sale is complete, TeleBright.com acts as the sales agent for the small business--tracking the sale through delivery and providing e-mail updates to the client.
TeleBright.com promises to check with each customer 90 days after the sale to ensure products were delivered and are performing as promised. Small businesses receive periodic reassessments of their chosen plan and are sent an e-mail notification if relevant new service plans for the chosen provider become available. Bundled service options are also available, offering additional discounts to small businesses that purchase multiple services from a single provider.
TeleBright.com also has exclusive partnership agreements with value-added resellers that allow their support experts to meet one-on-one with small business clients to discuss more complex service options.
TeleBright.com receives a fee from providers for all services it sells, but since the company receives a commission from all providers on its site, it doesn't benefit from steering clients to particular providers or promoting one provider's services over another.
The site will begin to offer wireless services in July in 40 metropolitan areas consisting of 156 cities, with a minimum of three and a maximum of five in each area.
"There are two other sites that do something like what we're doing but aren't nearly as comprehensive as we are and don't provide the instant comparisons we do," says Thaker.
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