World Wide Telecard (wwt) Case

World Wide Telecard is a wholesale distributor for pre paid phone cards business. The company started in 1998 under the name of World Wide Communication. In 2003, a merge between World Wide and another company happened, which is why the name was changed to what it is now.

In 1998, WWT was doing business locally in northern California only. At that time, the phone card business was growing fast which pushed the company to grow with it and expand to have distribution in different states. Now WWT has distributors in 24 different states.

When WWT started the business, they used to sell other company's phone cards. Because of the competition that was growing with the growth of the business, WWT changed its strategy by having their own private label of phone cards in order to limit the competition for distribution and wholesale because no body carried these cards except WWT in the USA.

WWT departments and employees:

The first time WWT was established as a small business, there were three departments:

1. Sales department.

2. Inventory department.

3. Route department.

The number employees who were taking care of the business at that time were 6 employees:

* A salesman in the sales department

* An inventory manager in the inventory room.

* A data entry person in the route department.

* The manager (the same as a CEO).

* Two sales reps to serve the stores.

Now after the expansion WWT made in the past years, more people got involve in the process after adding more customers nation wide, and more stores in northern California, some of the departments stayed as it is and more people and departments have been added as the following:

* Walk in customer's sales department: help all walk in distributors in sales and credits; also bring more distributors to improve the sales volume of this department.

* Shipping customer's sales department: help shipping customers in sales and credits, track incoming and out going packages, follow up with shipping company's bills and bring more distributors to improve the sales volume of this department.

* Route department: prepare all sales rep orders and credits, put all the data entry of the sales rep each in the system and follow up with sales rep on their daily collection.

* Activation department: most of the cards that the company receives are not working for security, in case it been lost or damaged through the shipping. We call them "dead cards"; the activation department activates these cards with the venders or the carriers based on the inventory department request. Follow up with the dead cards inventory and keep in touch with the printers and the venders to get the supply.

* Inventory department: preparing orders and returns received cards from other departments, making orders with the activation department to fill up the shortage cards, and check the inventory by the end of the day to fix the problems.

* Accounting department: follow up with accounts receivable and accounts payable, employee payroll and sales rep commission, company expenses and bank accounts.

* Office manager: follow up with the daily working process, working with the sales department to improve sales, solving department problems, improve the operation performance and finding solutions to lower expenses.

Prepaid phone card business:

The prepaid phone card service is one of different services VOIP provide. VOIP was created in the early 1980's with the start of the internet. VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol, which means making phone calls through the internet instead using regular phone lines. As we know, when using the internet that means we transfer data from one computer to another. VOIP works the same way, except first it translates the voice to data then transfers it.

In 1996, US telecommunication companies asked US Congress to ban Internet phone technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoIP). Then a lot of VOIP service providers started launching their services to the people. One of these services was prepaid phone cards. We call them, in our business language, carriers because they carry the calls between two different destinations.

The way prepaid phone cards work is the following:

* All prepaid phone cards use the toll free number so the customer can use this service without getting extra charges other than the charge he paid for the phone card. Some other companies provide local access to every city, instead of the toll free number because it is cheaper for them. All calls customers making through the toll free number or the local access number are forwarded to the prepaid phone cards service provider switches and from there they start giving their service.

* The first thing the customer hears is a request to enter the pin number, which is hidden under a scratch off on the back of the card in order to protect the customer from theft. The pin number is the value of the card the customer pays for. The value varies based on the dominations of the cards.

* Then the customer will hear the value of his pin as remaining balance, if he used it before, if not he should have the full amount. After hearing the amount on the card, the customer reaches the billing system which has all the pins the company generates when manufacturing the phone cards.

* After that, the customer will hear a request to dial the destination number he would like to call. The rates vary from one country to another based on country government rate prices.

* When you are done with the card, either you use it all so you have zero remaining balance, or you use part of it and you will still have a remaining balance which will allow you to use the card again. Some phone cards are rechargeable which means you can call a customer service number to recharge your card based on the amount you would like to add. Most of the cards are not rechargeable, which means after you are done with it you just throw it away.

The prepaid phone card is a telecommunication business for domestic and international calls. When it was founded in 1996, a lot of domestic phone cards were sold because of the high nationwide rates that regular phone companies provided. But in early 2002, domestic businesses started decreasing because of the competition that started heating up between big companies who started to provide unlimited nationwide through cell