U.S. Cellular Consolidates Operations onto Amdocs Billing and Customer Care Platform(email this article)

ST. LOUIS, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Amdocs (NYSE: DOX - News) (Company Profile, Past Stories, Case Studies), the world's leading provider of billing and CRM, today announced that U.S. Cellular Corporation (Amex: USM - News), one of the leading providers of wireless communications services in the U.S., has successfully completed the conversion of its subscriber base in the Midwest region, formerly the PrimeCo wireless market acquired by U.S. Cellular in August 2002, onto the Amdocs billing and customer care platform. This conversion marks U.S. Cellular's decision to consolidate two disparate billing systems onto the Amdocs single platform, allowing U.S. Cellular to offer its more than 4.3 million customers unified, state-of-the-art billing and customer care support across its different regional operations.

"We differentiate ourselves by providing superior customer service," said Karen Kirwan, CIO, U.S. Cellular. "As we grow into new markets, we need to build on our existing strengths for maximum operational efficiencies and customer satisfaction. The Amdocs platform has been one of our key customer service enablers since it was first installed back in 1995 -- bringing all of our new subscribers onto it will allow us to offer our customers the best service available while reducing costs and embracing a more profitable future. The current conversion was the smoothest executed in the history of U.S. Cellular, and we are extremely pleased that our customers experienced no setbacks in service levels during the crossover."

The Amdocs system facilitates improved provisioning through faster customer activation, enables increased time-to-market advantages for new services and products with simplified promotion and rate-plan implementation, and allows convergent billing capabilities for voice and data services. Eliminating duplication of parallel systems in different markets will lead to a significant decrease in ownership and training costs, and optimized control over billing operations and software for improved performance.

"We are pleased U.S. Cellular chose to leverage its existing investment in our platform, as well as our unique and proven global expertise in providing mission-critical services -- to help ensure a low-risk path to the success of its customer satisfaction strategy," said Gary Smith, Division President at Amdocs. "The remarkably seamless rollout of the current conversion of the former PrimeCo subscriber base further demonstrates our ability to assume wider responsibility for improving our customers' business operations. This conversion will help to preserve U.S. Cellular's exceptionally low churn rate as it continues to expand its regional footprint."

About U.S. Cellular

U.S. Cellular Corporation, the nation's eighth largest wireless service carrier, provides wireless service to more than 4.3 million customers in 150 markets across 26 states. The Chicago-based company operates on a customer satisfaction strategy, meeting customers' needs by providing a comprehensive range of wireless products and services, superior customer support and a high quality network. U.S. Cellular is listed and traded as USM on the American Stock Exchange.

About Amdocs

Amdocs is the world's leading provider of billing and CRM software products and services. By combining its world-class offerings with a track record of more than 20 years of delivery excellence, Amdocs enables major communications, high-tech and financial services organizations around the globe to reduce their costs, enhance the loyalty of their valued customers, and realize profitable growth. For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com