The challenge we faced

Every business has revenue leakage, it is just called different things in different industries. (E.g. in the retail industry it is referred to as shrinkage.) Various industry experts and carrier surveys indicate that telecommunication operators may be losing from 1% to 30% of their revenue. Whilst surveys of corporate customers of major telecommunication operators reported finding billing errors 1% to 10% of the time A PWC analysis of 240 telecommunication operators found the split in revenue leakage to be apportioned as follows:

• 44% CDR errors
• 16% incomplete customer details
• 16% fraud
• 14% bad debt
• 10% billing errors

Based on the above, 70% of revenue leakage can be detected and rectified by the telecommunication operators as part of revenue assurance (RA) activities.

Our solution

iServ Revenue Assurance allows the operator to take a balanced approach to RA. This means the operator can use reports to highlight risks and trigger investigations in areas where sporadic or ad-hoc problems occur and use continuous reconciliations to manage areas where errors / anomalies are repetitive and the cost is material.

This balanced approach eliminates the reports that produce large volumes of data that no one uses or reports that no one even looks at anymore. By reducing the number of reconciliations, RA staff do not waste time reviewing and trying to balance multitudes of reconciliations that all have some sort of tolerance value in anyway, instead of performing RA investigations.

A unique benefit of iServ Revenue Assurance is it’s ability to allow RA specialists, with limited or no special IT skills to perform comprehensive in-depth investigations on any area of the business. The RA specialists are not restricted to aggregated / summarized data and thus can continue their investigation right down to the individual record level.

These investigations form the backbone to any great RA operation. It is upon these investigations that an efficient and effective RA system can be implemented alleviating the various problems associated with the historic “big bang” approach to implementing RA which resulted in so many “white elephant” RA systems.

The flexible nature of iServ Revenue Assurance caters perfectly to the telecommunications environment where operational systems are forever changing especially with the introduction of new services and products. Thus the entire billing chain can be monitored including special promotions or campaigns being undertaken on an ad-hoc basis.