During my return flight from the TMF Team Action Week, in Virginia a thunderstorm over Newark occurred and my connection flight was canceled. As a result I had to take a later flight with a Major American airline company.

When I arrived at the check-in counter in Dulles airport, I was informed by the airline company representative that I was removed from my original flight back to Israel.

When I asked why? She smiled and explained very politely that sometimes when you miss your flight the computer automatically deletes you from the list.   She immediately added that I should not worry, and that it is very likely that there will be seats free on the next available flight going back home.

I must say that I was very relieved to hear this and I was still optimistic, however, due to my previous experiences, and in order to avoid any inconvenience, I approached the representative again trying to reconfirm that I’ll have a seat on my flight from Newark to Tel Aviv, explaining that I prefer to stay overnight in Virginia and fly a day later. She smiled again and said twice “there will be no problem Sir”.

The first flight went as expected, but on my connecting flight from Newark, as I was two hours early I still hurried to the gate to be sure I will have a place on the flight and to be on the safe side. Still, nobody was willing to speak with me until all passengers with assigned seats had boarded. Due to security procedures my contact to airline company staff was very limited and I had access only through the security personnel. After two hours I was informed that the flight was fully booked – and there is nothing they can do about it, because they already closed the gate.

The moral of the story, it cost the airline company an unhappy customer, some money as compensation, the cost of a hotel, and food.I am not familiar with the airlines industry, but I know that the airlines industry is in a crisis, the price of the oil is skyrocketing. I know that overbooking is a well establish policy in airlines, and I assume that it has an economical benefit in many situations. Yet it is also clear to me that given the extra costs, it is likely that Airline Company lost money on me, and that if they were having their systems/procedures right, they could have found a volunteer for staying in Newark, for a lower cost, and avoid a discontent customer who flies very often. So I wonder if Airlines should learn also a bit from the telecommunications industry and be more pro- active by adopting a better CRM system, a Revenue Assurance solution, etc.  

A new report  from Ernst and Young says that Indian operators are losing out of revenues to the tune of 2.5 percent of their total revenues in a year. This is due to revenue leakages caused because of data loss between systems, external frauds and inadequate controls.
The report estimates this loss to be currently at $750 million.

It looks that the Indian operators have a revenue leakage problem, but of course at the same time they have a great opportunity. Hey, but I also found in a survey done by UK research firm Analysys, that

External fraud, internal fraud and fraud by other operators, grew from 2.9% of operators’ total revenue last year to 4.5% this year, said the survey by UK research firm Analysys. … Together this has driven the overall levels of revenue leakage among global telecoms operators from 12.1% last year to 13.6% this year.

So perhaps the Indian operators are doing a great job in regard revenue leakages (at least compared to the rest of the world) Go figure; let me finish with two linked paraphrases

The problem with Industry studies/surveys/reports is that there are so many of them, yet, you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them

Associated Press reported on Monday that,

AT&T customers who have seen mysterious charges for ringtones and other content show up on their cell-phone bills will be eligible for refunds as part of the settlement of a group of class-action lawsuits, a lawyer for the class said Monday.

Customers will able to claim refunds for spurious charges that appeared on up to three of their monthly bills between Jan. 1, 2004, and May 30, 2008, according to Jay Edelson, lead counsel for the plaintiffs.….

Vendors of ringtones and daily text-message services with horoscopes and jokes solicit customers to sign up by entering their phone numbers on Web sites or by sending text messages. The charges, which can be hidden or poorly explained, show up later on cell-phone bills, often as recurring charges.…

The cell-phone carrier keeps some of the fee and passes the rest to the content provider.…

Richter had no estimate for how much the settlement will cost AT&T. Given that the company already let customers contest spurious charges, he said the number who will get refunds through the settlement will be small. The company will pay the plaintiffs’ lawyers $4.3 million

Interesting, and raising many questions

1.      The legal responsibility of the SP, for services and charges, supplied by a third party, but billed by the SP.2.      Will the SP get back the unjustified fees it passed to the content provider

3.      What content consumption reporting mechanisms are in place to permit the SP to verify the content provider  claims, and vice versa to permit the content provider to check that it is receiving the due sums

4.      Now AT&T acknowledges the problem, do their existing mechanisms permit to discover which customers where unjustly charged, and if not, what mechanisms are needed?  It seems that AT&T will wait until the individual customers complaints. Is this approach something that regulation can permit in the long run?

5.      Don’t $4.3 million to the plaintiffs’ lawyers + whatever payments (which I assume will be higher) to the customers + the cost of handling all the individual claims justify some investment in RA tools, and proactive RA methodologies, to prevent such things from happening?

Content is out there and it is a mayor opportunity for SPs. Just supplying it without taking appropriate practices is a mayor risk – it is the SPs responsibility to mitigate the risks, to really enjoy the fruits of the content revolution.

Need I mentioned, proactive Revenue Assurance when launching new services, reactive Revenue Assurance for monitoring unexpected problems, and active Revenue Assurance for solving issues before they affect the bill (without waiting 3.5 years!!!) – Or perhaps these well established paradigms do apply only to new generation services? 

Two weeks ago I participated in the IBC conference in Panama, which had two tracks, one for Fraud and Revenue Assurance and the second for Billing.I attended both tracks and was a panelist in the Billing session. In the Billing track there were probably 35 participants, representing about 15 SP’s.

It was a good opportunity to see how RA activities are perceived by non-RA people. I opened with a question that might sound passé these days, “who is familiar with Revenue Assurance” – all were. I have asked this question to similar crowds over the last 6-7 years. 6 years ago after I got the negative replies I had no alternative but to explain, what is RA, why is it needed, etc.; nowadays the question seems redundant – and it cheers me up to re-discover this. 

I continued by asking about their perception of RA, with nicknames of these perceptions:  “The enemy”, “The auditor”, ” An obstacle” and ” Somebody that can help”. Nobody saw RA as the enemy or the auditor, only two participants saw RA as “An obstacle”, and the rest saw RA as an entity that can help to achieve business targets. The two participants that saw RA as an obstacle explained that the main reason is that RA sometimes causes delays or extra work in the release of new products.

Even if you are pessimistic, and in this case I am not, and you claim that the billing people’s response came from of “political correctness” – being that political correct “thing” will certainly help RA in fulfillment of its target, but in this case I am not pessimistic. I think the real reason for other departments to embrace RA is that they can see the value of RA, combined by RA professionals taking the right attitude, presenting themselves as partners and not as “auditors”.

I recently returned from an excellent IBC conference on Fraud and Revenue Assurance in Panama. I get to travel often, and one of the things that surprised me in Panama, is the joy of its people, in most countries people seems to be concerned with their day to day problems , in Panama, all the people to whom I spoke, stated that “estoy contento” (I am happy) – it is really nice to be in a country with happy people (It seems that my superficial perceptions are backed by some serious studies – Panama is ranked in the 5^th place out of 178 in the happy planet index)  . Now to even happier things Revenue Assurance; during the conference I asked people about the involvement of Revenue Assurance in launching new products and new services; Is RA checking the new products from its beginning, Can RA stop risky new products, Is RA approval required?  I asked the same question a similar group of operators in Latin America about 1.5-2 years ago, back then, roughly 90% of the answers I got varied between “we wish that we were involved”, to ” you must be kidding, nobody will let us to do it”,  Quoting Dinah Washington What A Difference A Day Makes;   only 1.5-2 years after , in a room with 40 participants, roughly representing 20 operators from Latin America, nobody claimed not being involved in launching new products, most claimed to be involved from the beginning, and to be able to either stop/delay new launches,  or to do a risk assessment, which is reviewed and signed by the people launching the new products. Moreover some of the operators said that similar procedures exist for installing new operational system, and a few stated that they are also involved in a similar way in changes in existing systems.

From my experience a similar changes occurred worldwide – RA in more and more places is becoming more and more proactive; I think that this is very positive as long that we all remember that even the most meticulous proactive RA cannot prevent leakages all together, and therefore reactive and active RA controls will always be needed as a complement to a strong proactive RA approach

  Home page  

More than 340 individuals, representing more than 150 companies; these are the members of the Revenue Assurance team of the Telemanagement Forum (TMF).

If you are already a member of the RA team you can find more detailed information here.

If your company is already a member of the TMF, and you already have a TMF login and password then you can join the RA team here

If your company is already a member of the TMF, but you still do not have a TMF password and login open a TMF account here and later join the team here.

If your company is not a member of the TMF, you can still learn more about the TMF here and the TMF’s RA team here.

And of course you can always send me an email gadi@cvidya.com  

BLU-RAY won the high definition format war over Toshiba’s HD-DVD format.  On February 19^th 2008 Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation announced in a PR that, “We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called ‘next-generation format war’ and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,”  According to Nishida, the Time Warner announcement of January 4^th 2008 stating that Time Warner will  support only the BLU-RAY standard,  had a tremendous impact on Toshiba’s decision to give up on the HD-DVD.   Read the rest of this entry »

In Google alerts I often get RA position descriptions, so I decided to do a completely non-scientific survey. I googled, “Revenue Assurance Specialist jobs”. Below are the first relevant results I got.

Certainly given the way I conducted the survey, any conclusions are at the reader’s own discretion. Yet if you are looking for a job as a “Revenue Assurance Specialist” be prepared to at least know how to type, and preferably in windows 98 J

During my undergraduate studies I took a bunch of courses in Philosophy. One of my recreations was “Reductio ad absurdum”, where you basically take the  writings of some of the great philosophers and manage to arrive at contradictory and/or absurd conclusions. Last week I had a very interesting conversation that reminded me of my past hobby, and I admit in advance that I am over simplifying …;

1. The regulation penalizes Service Providers for having too many incorrect charging/un-billed CDRs etc.

2. RA’s job (among others) involves discovering leakages, including incorrect charging /un-billed CDRs etc.

3. Discovering leakages, in many cases results in the recovery of leakages

4. Discovering Leakages, in many cases results in finding the root of problems and avoiding the same problem from reoccurring

5. For Service Providers to improve their profitability and future compliance to regulatory requirements they have to find and prevent the reoccurrence of leakages. But this exposes the fines themselves. However by not looking seriously for leakages, the Service Provider loses money, but is compliant. In some cases the same person is in charge of the Regulatory compliance and Revenue Assurance. Go figure.

In the past we have heard a whole range of statistics for Revenue Assurance. the percentage of Revenue Leakage (are you familiar with the famous 1- 15% ?), the percentage of acceptable Revenue Leakage, etc.   

The problem with most published  information is that at the best of times it is based on conversations and experience and at the worst of times it is based on pure imagination, and wishful thinking. What it was never based on was a rigorous and unbiased study (don’t even try to convince me that a “20 minutes to complete” survey without exact metric definitions is rigorous benchmarking – sorry no links here - it quite simply is not).  Now for the first time a serious organization, the TeleManagement Forum (TMF), is taking a serious step toward a reliable benchmark in their  RA benchmarking survey  

I cannot claim impartiality regarding this survey, I am one of the many persons that worked on defining the Revenue Assurance Standard KPIs (RASK) proposed by the TMF which are at the core of this benchmarking; I think we did a good job setting 20 standard strategic KPIS that cover 3 important aspects, the leakages, the coverage of RA activities, and the efficiency of RA in the organization. 

I must admit that in the past I did not really believe that Service Providers (SPs) would be willing to participate in such a study; to my surprise many SPs were more than willing to participate. The question is, why? SPs need to understand their situation vs. the industry and need to report their management in a reliable and agreeable way (and it is really difficult to convince management of your numbers , if you are the one that decided how and what to measure) – so RA practitioners  embrace the concept of having standard KPIs and using them for benchmarking. The good news is that this study is open to all the TMF members.

Being the first RA benchmarking survey organized by the TMF, the TMF is willing to invite a limited number of non members to participate free of charge. Again I am biased, I am involved , and I am all in favor of this study, but I sincerely believe that it is an important opportunity for our industry- so I will end by preaching to all you SPs out there that by participating, you will both contribute to the industry, and benefit yourself. So go on,  BE A PART OF THIS RA BENCHMARKING STUDY!