Classmates.com 2008 Annual Report Download - page 21

Table of Contents
generally billed for products and services and are billed or credited for net order activity on a monthly basis.
The vast majority of our pay accounts pay us in advance with a credit card. Other payment options for some of our pay services include
automated clearinghouse ("ACH"), personal check or money order, or via a customer's local telephone bill. Pay Internet access accounts that
elect to pay with a personal check or money order are not provisioned until their payment is received and they are required to subscribe for one
of our prepaid multi-month billing plans.
We utilize a combination of third-party and internally-developed software applications for customer billing. Customer billing is a complex
process and our billing systems must efficiently interface with third-parties' systems, such as our credit card, ACH and telephone bill processors'
systems. Our ability to accurately and efficiently bill and collect payment from our members is dependent on the successful operation of our
billing systems and various third-party processors. In addition, our ability to offer new pay services or alternative payment plans is dependent on
our ability to customize our billing systems.
Customer Support and Retention
We believe reliable customer service and technical support are important to retaining our customers. Our businesses generally offer a
variety of online and offline tools designed to provide solutions and answers to frequently asked questions. These tools are also designed to assist
our customers in verifying and updating their account information. In addition, we offer traditional email support and certain of our services
provide live telephone support as well.
Our customer relationship management and support infrastructure includes employees at our facilities in Hyderabad, India; Woodland Hills,
California; Fort Lee, New Jersey; Seattle, Washington; San Francisco, California; Downers Grove, Illinois; Centerbrook, Connecticut; Medford,
Oregon; Sherwood, Arkansas; Sleaford, England; and Nottingham, England. We also outsource substantially all of our telephone support and
some of our email support for our Classmates Media and Communications services to a third-party. We monitor the effectiveness of our
customer support functions and measure performance metrics such as average hold time and first call resolution and abandonment rates.
Communications with our customers are logged and categorized to enable us to recognize and act on trends. An internal quality assurance team
monitors the performance of our customer support vendor and provides feedback to improve their skills and establish consistency throughout our
customer support functions.
Technology
Each of our services, including our floral network services, our social networking services, our loyalty marketing services, and our Internet
access services, operates on a separate and distinct technology platform. Each of our services is generally provided through a combination of
internally-developed and third-party software, industry standard hardware and outsourced network services. We have developed software to
enhance the functionality of certain components of our services, including connectivity, Web services, billing, email, customer support, customer
loyalty applications, and targeted advertising. We have also internally-developed order processing, order fulfillment and customer service
systems which provide communication to our florist members and third-party suppliers. We maintain data centers in multiple locations around
the country with, in many cases, redundant systems to provide high levels of service availability and connectivity. FTD's data center is
maintained at its headquarters in Downers Grove, Illinois. We host the majority of our other data center services in third-party co-location
facilities and outsource all of our bandwidth and managed modem services. We also utilize a third-party to develop, host and maintain FTD's
consumer Web sites, and this third-party hosts these Web sites at several co-location facilities.
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