Today Challenges for Revenue Assurance

Chair in the Boat by Trey Ratcliff (CC@Flickr.com)

On previous my Blog Article "The Old School - Revenue Assurance",  I share about the very early perspective of revenue assurance. At that time, people in Billing Unit, play crucial role, where the billing process should be watched carefully in order to prevent the potential loss. At the same time, the available product and technology remain simple where telephony service and circuit-based switch technology were the common term.

When we talk about today. Technology already changed as the time goes. The variety of product can be found on the market. We notice the present of prepaid system. We know about mobile service, for both phone and  data-internet. Video service becomes common. Moreover the coming application and content service on Telco's industry which blurred into computer, internet and content industry.

On other side, the marketing strategy in order to win the competition  create so many gimmick programs. This also push more complex on administration, billing, and service provisioning. For example, on mobile phone service, people can have different discount price and even free services. It is also restricted by time-frame or duration since they registered, promotional become more personal.

As the impact of those change, delivering  revenue assurance into situation where it plays an important role. Billing unit is not the single unit that responsible for all process. People in Marketing Unit, Network Unit, Financial Unit, even Distributor Channel Management Unit and Supplier Unit now should be involved in revenue assurance activities.

The scope of revenue assurance also are bigger now. The process range from product development, marketing/sales, network provisioning, billing, collection, to accounting are  parts of revenue assurance. The system entity that involved also become wider, from network element to business support system need to be covered. It also cover the system that integrated with supplier and distributor that involved in the company.

At this point, we now realize that we need another level of revenue assurance that can manage all above issues. We need another level of thinking to solve a new level of challenges.