Will the revenue leakage increase with the emergence of 3G / 4G services?
In today’s competitive environment, streamlining and optimizing OSS/BSS operations from network operations (legacy, next-generation and hybrid), service fulfillment, service assurance to billing””is a must for telecom service providers.
OSS/BSS solutions in the past focused mainly on subscriber management, inventory management and revenue realization through basic voice and related services. With introduction of 3G/4G services & MNP, new services will be launched daily, which means the OSS/BSS platform has to be flexible and scalable while being able to offer high quality services (like Mobile Banking, IPTV , Mobile Video etc) to both rural and urban subscribers.
In other words, the OSS/BSS platform will have to cater to multiple technologies, customer types and services on the same platform and at the same time reduce the per subscriber cost – this explosion in complexity coupled with service proliferation surely increases the probability of revenue leakages in the OSS/BSS revenue chain.
What is your guidance to operators to stop revenue leakage?
Revenue Assurance is about being able to plug leakages (both proactively and reactively) in the revenue value chain and contribute to current and future revenues and profits. It is also about driving operational processes to a state of excellence where the provider can monetize his infrastructure in the most effective manner with minimal losses.
Not being able to manage data integrity across systems and gaps in order management, order fulfillment processes leads to high leakage and shows up in the form of usage discrepancies. Misunderstanding of complex rating requirements and incorrect implementations of rate plans also contribute to leakage.
Leading global service providers, ranging from 2 million to 100+ million subscribers and in a variety of segments across mobile, cable, wire line and IP services, have partnered with Connectiva to identify and recover more than $500 million in revenue losses. We focus not just on setting up standard KPIs and controls (the known knowns) but also help operators discover hitherto unknown areas of leakage.
What are the specific demands of your operators in Asia, Europe and the US?
Across geographies we see that the domain of revenue assurance is morphing from reactive leakage identification to a more holistic revenue optimization function that can proactively identify disconnects, prevent opportunity losses and bridge the gap between customer satisfaction and revenue assurance functions.
Fraud management is a highly mature function in developed markets and a lot of thought and effort has gone into defining standards for fraud processes. On the other hand, Revenue Assurance is still an immature function with sparse acceptance of standards. In most leading providers, RA and fraud management functions are distinct and separate. However, there is increasing convergence of fraud management & revenue assurance especially in emerging markets where there is no organizational and IT legacy for separate departments.
Connectiva was one of the pioneers in designing a natively integrated system for RA and Fraud that was built from the ground up to share common schema, meta data, business process infrastructure and analytic services. We believe that providers stand to gain significant value by leveraging a common set of foundation tools without losing the capability to deliver distinctly different fraud and RA applications to the two groups of analysts.
What are your expansion plans in India, Brazil, Africa, the Middle East and China?
The markets in Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific are our fastest growing segments and we are the leading provider of revenue assurance and fraud management solutions in these regions. We continue to expand presence in Latin America and China and are working with some very large operators.
We also leverage key SI partners as reseller channels where appropriate and depending on customer preferences. In addition to software licenses and hosted solutions, Connectiva provides business consulting, technology, implementation and managed services.
What are the trends in the market?
RA is morphing from reactive leakage identification to a more holistic revenue optimization function that can proactively identify disconnects, prevent opportunity losses and bridge the gap between customer satisfaction and revenue assurance functions.
RA and FM will converge on the IT side under a common owner especially in emerging markets.
Over the long term, we believe that Customer experience analytics will merge with revenue assurance and fraud as all these domains leverage similar sets of data and analytic services.
