Revenue Assurance – Global Village or Isolated Isle?

Revenue Assurance – Global Village or Isolated Isle?

R Mattison’s Podcast

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

That is an old saying that keeps proving itself in the world of telecommunications. For decades now, telecommunications have grown, expanded and developed into one of the largest and most profitable and influential industries in the world.

When I worked at AT&T back in the good old days, everyone was trained to understand all of the different aspects of the technology and the business. We could hook up the phone line, work as an operator, string the lines on the poles and even troubleshoot a circuit. For the telecom employee back then it was about making sure that one had an integrated view of the technology and kept their eye on the ball, the ball being the profits that were being generated.

Unfortunately, in order to grow and expand, individuals and professionals in corporate cultures have had to adapt in order to accommodate the incredible rate of change and sheer volume of continuously updated knowledge that has to be dealt with. Because there are so many different things to know and so many things to keep track of, the telecom has changed from a single global village type of view, where all of the people work together on the same thing at the same time, to a huge collection of separate islands of knowledge and influence.

In telecoms today, it is literally impossible to understand it all, and understand how it all works. It takes dozens of specialists to make something work, and over time, these specialists tend to pull up their gangplanks and isolate themselves. So was born the revenue assurance function. Revenue assurance was created as a fill-in or stopgap function. But, revenue assurance were the people who brought the complete view of the products and services back into focus.

Over the years revenue assurance teams have proven repeatedly that their single-minded focus on the sanctity of the revenue resulted in big returns for telcos. And the reason is clear, it is because revenue assurance brings back the integrated single village view. Unfortunately, as revenue assurance grows in popularity and acceptance, I am sensing a seriously damaging trend. What is this trend? Revenue assurance is turning into yet another island of expertise. More and more revenue assurance professionals are digging in and specializing, creating yet another isolated function.

I know its human nature to try to seek out the comfort and tranquility of a specialized, isolated set of tools and functions. I know that it is counter-intuitive for many people to actually seek out chaos and confusion, look for conflict and disparity and try to interject a sense of order and priority into the mess. However, this is exactly what revenue assurance has always been about. As we move forward and we continue to struggle with ourselves and our profession, I think that it is critical to keep this at the forefront of our thoughts.

When revenue assurance becomes too specialized and isolated, it nullifies itself as having any value. In fact if you are a revenue assurance professionals and you are beginning to suspect that management and the operational teams are questioning the value of your services then maybe you could do a little soul searching in this area.

I am reminded of what I was told by a revenue assurance management team for the TelNor Group, a few years ago. They told me that their mission was to make revenue assurance everyone’s problem. What a concept! Their goal was that every area of the company— customer service, to sales to marketing, and everyone else, include their KPIs as a revenue assurance component. What a powerful idea! When you think about it, it is pretty much spot on.

The job of the revenue assurance team should never be anything but the proactive, aggressive search for risks to the company’s revenues and working with the company’s operational teams to make them aware of problems and help correct them. Our mission should not be to offload risk and problems from operational managers, but to focus on techniques for helping those managers optimize their activities. We should not try to function as a telco police force that goes around finding fault and putting bandages on broken systems and processes.

In an ideal, albeit less than realistic world, I think the revenue assurance team could be like of small team of revenue cheerleaders or team of revenue advocates; people who specialize in making sure that everyone in the company, and all of those isolated pockets, have an awareness of and a dedication to, maximizing revenues and profit. What a concept! The job of revenue assurance therefore is to eliminate the need for revenue assurance. Will it ever happen? Probably not! At least not for a few more years. In the meantime, it offers us a very refreshing and potent goal for our revenue assurance activities.

Revenue assurance is not a specialization that should be isolated from the other operational areas; revenue assurance should be a generalization. Revenue assurance should be injected into the DNA of all the operational groups, whether those groups be marketing, sales, new product development, network, billing or anything else.

Maybe there is potential here than we realized. Is Revenue assurance about helping the telco to return to the global village model or is it about creating islands of isolation? That is a decision each of us has to make for ourselves. What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts about this.