Learning Point from "Theft of Phone Deposit" Case

Family Portrait with Peanut Butter and Roller Coaster by David Blackwell. (CC.@Flickr)

Perhaps you've heard about the incident on "Theft of Deposit Telephone" that some time ago made an uproar in Indonesia. Customers who feel lost deposit their telephone operators started demand to  phone operators  to explain about  the incident. The suspect are the premium content services that provide sms-based information and other service to phone user. The situation became more critical after there are no common understanding among stakeholders. Even the government should step in and finally, lead to the closure of Premium SMS services. This situation creates  business uncertainty for content provider.


But on the other hand, there seems to be something that is not fair, where the incident such as this should already be known by the stakeholders. Customers that aware about this objection, they would have filed the complain some time ago. The operators also have received their customer complaint. As well as their business partners, the content providers, they also  have received information related to this. The interesting point is  why did this incident become increasingly large and apparently ignored by the service provider since it's first appearance.




On the Little Corner of Business Side


The next question, is about the compliance of business to the regulation. It is clear that Service Providers like telco's companies should make sure that their business is compliance with the rules, especially Customer Protection. Indonesia Law, under UU Perlindungan Konsumen Nomor 8 Tahun 1999 Tentang Perlindungan Konsumen Republik Indonesia, already regulate that every Indonesia customer has a right for their comfort, security, and safety in consuming goods and services in Indonesia.


In a company perspective, they have the same goal related with the quality of their product. They should make sure that their product has an excellent quality as well as their delivery product and financial administration. Management have aware that high quality of their product, e.g price, specification and process meet with their standard. Company should make sure that product is safe, and convenient to be consumed by their customer.


One of the management practices in  guaranteeing  their product meet it's specification is revenue assurance. It is a niche management practices which has two side of goals. The first goal is to make sure that the price, the bill  and the billing process that sent to customer comply with their customer contract.  On the other hand, this revenue assurance activity make sure that the financial aspect of product (revenue and cost of) is guaranteed to be completely received by the company.


How to do the activity of revenue assurance is the main goal of this blog, which is to share the knowledge of revenue assurance and endorsed the practices as part of  for business activities.