Revenue Assurance: Telecom Business Perspective

What is revenue Leakage?

Revenue leakage is the failure of the service provider to invoice for delivered service instances or transactions, leading to a loss of money that the customer owes.This is not a new concern and most service providers have been looking at revenue assurance over the past few years.Revenue leakages also occur through fraud, which is often stated to be the biggest source of revenue loss. The main source of revenue leakage, however, comes in the form of faulty call detail records (CDRs) and not fraud! Therecan be a number of reasons for CDRs getting lost or getting corrupted, leading to revenue leakage.In addition to CDR related problems, problems in processes like ordermanagement and provisioning can also cause revenue leakage.

The non-technical reason for revenue leakage is generally deliberate from the end customer’s side and thus stated as fraud.

Fraud - In a broad definition, is a deliberate misrepresentation, which causes another person to suffer damages, usually monetary losses. Fraud in telecom networks has been a problem that has always affected the bottom line of service providers. Innovation is the hallmark of this stratum of fraudsters who can go to great extents to achieve their purpose. Telecom companies have been trying to fight fraud for a long time but the imaginative methods employed by fraudsters call for continuous improvements on the solutions deployed.

Where is the Service Provider’s money going?

Telecom services providers the world over, have been slightly unmindful of revenue leakages, until recently! Time was when, owing to rapidly expanding revenues, these telcos had little concern for revenue leakages. The situation however is fast changing now!

Studies by business intelligence firms indicate that revenue leakages could range anywhere between 3 to 15 percent of the annual revenue. Factors such as service type, carrier type and the revenue assurance maturity level, impact revenue leakages and these problems are spread over a multitude of procedures, processes and technical issues.

What is Revenue assurance?

Revenue Assurance is the work effort to ensure that processes, practices, and procedures maximize revenues or at least check the leakage. Revenue assurance has been a hot topic for several years now and a great deal of time and resources have been spent trying to identify and stop revenue leakage. Despite this, service providers do not appear to be successfully tackling the problem.  RA - A Dynamic Paradigm

Revenue Assurance MUST be seen as a PRACTICE AREA cutting across all people, processes and systems to ensure that the organization adopts to RA Paradigm and adjusts to the DYNAMIC trends in the business holistically and whole heartedly to ensure and assure that the issues are tackled at their origin.

RA practice is iterative with continuous improvement Where is the industry? 

Revenue Assurance is the buzz word among the Service Providers and Software Solution providers, wherein lots of views, definitions and solutions around the term “RA” are in market from simple reconciliation of systems to sophisticated solutions that are YET to produce the BIG results that are promised.

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Regards

Viral Shah