Need for automated revenue assurance in telecoms

The practice of revenue assurance has evolved from simply identifying leaks to being the process through which continual improvement could be driven.

  • TM forum (Revenue assurance – quick insights)

*A single person uses 3-4 different types of telecommunication services in a day. Let’s consider India that has a population of around 1.2 billion with 2 plans being offered by a telecom service provider (TSP) and 2 telecom services are being used by each person. 4billion+ bills are generated considering each service and each plan differently. Imagine the bills generated by TSP’s around the globe.

The revenue assurance team comes into picture due to the possibility of overbilling and under billing. Revenue assurance team audits few bill from each batch to maintain bill accuracy. But the team cannot audit all the bills generated. Apart from the fact that the manual audit is a costly affair, the possibility of erroneous billing still exists.

TSP cannot create a positive experience with an overbilled monthly statement. And if the same situation repeats, the customer would go ahead and avail the service of another TSP. Now, if a telecom subscriber was under billed for the services availed, the TSP is losing its revenue.

So, the big question for the TSP’s is how to ensure it doesn’t under bill or over bill its subscribers. Transform your manual revenue assurance into an automated process.

The automated billing assurance system:

  1. Eliminates human errors in misinterpretation of plans and services activated for each subscriber. Thus, ensuring accurate billing for the different services availed by a subscriber.
  2. Automates the audit of bills by referring the services availed by the subscriber, and validates the same with the billing system. Thereby eliminating any computational errors in the bill presentment.

Accordingly, by ensuring error free bill presentment, the TSP is in compliance to the regulations of metering and billing, and the assurance of accurateness is also established. This would certainly be a game changer for Telco’s in the field of revenue assurance and would aid the TSP in battling the subscriber churn rate due to erroneous billing. The automation of revenue assurance would be a cost effective way of putting a lid to the revenue leakage for the TSP’s.

*Values were considered to show importance of revenue assurance. No real time values were used.

Acknowledgement – special thanks to Praveen Y (Analyst at Intense Technologies) for providing information on this domain