It seems Russian communications providers have broadened the definition of RA – to include blocking VoIP.

It is obvious Skype and IM erode prime revenues for any telco. The question that matters is whether they can find alternatives to compensate. It seems Putin and his buddies came up with a simpler solution: say Skype is a threat to national security (no one can argue with that) and, by the way, also a threat to the personal wealth of a few super-rich individuals.

I hadn’t conducted any further research whether this modus vivendi occurs between Skype and other countries or operators. It seems the old saying that “pornography is a matter of geography” also applies to RA.

I would like to share with you an article I stumbled upon that made me smile. Its title is “Life under the Chief Doublespeak Officer” and it was written in 1989 by William Lutz. In my view, it is as relevant as ever.

In this blog, I would like to challenge the definition of RA, following similar lines to the article above. I offer an idea why this function attracts only modest interest within a common telco.

No one would argue that the fundamental definition of Revenue Assurance is about assuring the telco makes money, this month. This necessitates that Marketing, Sales, and Operations have a joint and collective role in managing a customer experience that delivers the brand promise.

Yet, in how many telcos do RA managers have the freedom to evaluate the above functions, without first going through a career change opportunity?

Let’s see.

Marketing defines the brand promise

Marketing identifies the most profitable customers and what they value. Marketing documents and understands all aspects of the purchasing decision. It defines the attributes of product performance. It determines the brand promise and communicates it to the marketplace. In an ideal telco, Marketing and Operations work together to translate the customer experience into specific processes and actions through which the organization can deliver on the promise. If the brand cannot deliver on this promise, it is destined for failure.

• In how many telcos is RA an active contributor in these processes?
• In how many telcos does RA have any say in these topics?
• Would someone allow RA to review market research findings about brand strength?

Sales effectiveness

Without a skilled and productive sales organization, few firms can survive, especially these days. The sales function takes place in a constantly evolving environment. Sales organizations must adapt to continuous changes in their products, customers, competitors, and markets. Intense competition places great value on understanding and responding to current trends within and across industries.

• What RA department would call up residential customers and ask their view on the telco business?
• What RA department would pay a visit to a large corporate customer to learn about the issues that prompt them to take their business elsewhere?

Operations creates the right infrastructure and processes to deliver the brand promise

The brand promise is only as good as the internal processes that deliver it. Every process should be designed, monitored, and evaluated on its ability to deliver against brand promise. This includes defining and removing internal obstacles and then strengthening the organizational ‘enhancers’ (like communication systems and technology).

Successful organizational alignment means that Marketing and Operations have a joint and collective role in designing and managing a customer experience that delivers the brand promise.

• What RA department would call the call centre to experience the promises that Marketing states in its ads… without risking being right-sized by the COO immediately afterwards?
• What RA manager would propose metrics to evaluate operational effectiveness?

Conclusion

I guess I made my point. I would be intrigued to hear your comments.

I guess in a way I repeat myself. I admit I cannot help it. Returning just a couple of days ago from the US, and experiencing the impact of the financial crisis, is beyond any impression I can get from media reports and commentaries.

The US; a small town in Florida. A meeting on a Monday morning. An agenda, open issues, action items and all those mundane topics which you find in every meeting. However this time it was somewhat different. This time you see the faces of people that, instead going into through the listed issues, simply don’t care about the agenda. Instead, they discuss, in length, the breaking news of the morning: layoffs of 53,000 Citibank employees. Later that day, nobody was sure how to comment when CNN reported that, for the first time in its history, GM had stopped paying its dealers due to cash shortages. The gravity of the situation now leaves little room for imagination.

My personal view is that this crisis is far from reaching its bottom. Americans have maybe started to understand the scale of it, but there is still a long way to go before they fully comprehend. They still drive huge cars (by the standards of the rest of the world), care little about energy and do almost nothing about switching to sustainable energy sources. Nobody seems to be installing solar panels on the roofs of the houses in sunny Florida. The American car industry, which is one of the prime pillars of the American economy, is doing badly. American cars are sold mainly in the US and fail in international markets, because of their size, mediocre reliability and rather unappealing design. In California, the prevailing cars are no longer American-made. Korean, Japanese, and German manufacturers have taken their place. The American car manufacturers must understand what has gone wrong, or else they will suffer the same fate as the British automobile industry, which received generous government aid and ended by being sold for less then the value of its debts.

Meanwhile, the average white collar, middle class American is still overly concerned with the cost of a cup of cappuccino at Starbucks. On average, they spend $1200 a year on Starbucks’ hot water and coffee beans. Until they change their priorities, the effects of any economic stimulus will not radiate across the whole economy. At least this is my view. So far, no financial magazine expressed any interest in these views of mine…

However, along the same lines, all telcos and vendors are lowering their revenue forecasts. Sprint announced a new package – everything for $99.99/month. No small print. Unlimited everything – calls, SMS, MMS and data. I guess Sprint will soon be joined by others in the race to offer the best “eat as much as you can” offers.

The papers, any papers, even in a small town in Florida are filled with advice – on how to promote your value within your corporation. They are all full of recommendations on how to be a ‘big picture’ person, on how to justify your job, on how to… yada yada…

Where does revenue assurance fit into this new world order? In my previous blog I discussed the role of RA and where it stops. I’m afraid it was indeed a bedtime story. I would like to challenge the RA managers and ask them how they wish to justify their job when telcos start to adopt an ISP mentality and offer unlimited bundles of everything. What is the cost of the marketers offer? I hope someone did the “fear-greed” analysis prior to launch. Needless to say, I hope it was the RA manager that took up the challenge and questioned the level of profitability in front of the Board of Directors. Otherwise, unless I am missing something, why would anyone see a need for RA in this new régime? I sincerely hope that RA managers can reinvent themselves, and remain relevant.

Many years ago, in the year of 2001, there was Genie, the mobile internet portal by BT. Genie was an attempt by BT to unify various global brands into one as well as address the mobile internet. In the UK it was BT Cellnet, in Germany VIAG, Telfort in the NL and Digiphone in Ireland. Nowdays after change of ownership it is known as O2.

When I met the Chief Data & Marketing Officer of O2 and President of Genie, a long time ago, his vision was clear: data is data, and kilobytes are kilobytes. Just as customers pay the kWh cost for the electricity used to power their fridge or TV, mobile internet customers, he believed, should pay for the data they consume. To make life simple, the cost of each KB should be the same, whatever the customer is using it for.

I was hooked. This felt so good, like the feeling I get prior to making a smash in tennis. Yet there was some degree of doubt. So I asked the guy softly, if you are going to charge for a banking balance query say £0.80, and it usually comprised of 80 bytes, that means 1 byte costs £0.01. Would that mean when I download a 100kB web page, I should pay £1,000?

You would agree there was no point to continue the discussion. After all I was a vendor, he was a potential customer and a popular keynote speaker. So even though it is a vivid case of a fundamental flaw in the business model, it was not my role to confront him with blunt questions. The end result of Genie is history.

The one guy that made money from Genie, and similar failures along the way, is Matt Haig. He wrote Brand Failures: The Truth about the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time.

Let’s take a step back and discuss the telco business as a business with the objective to make money, or at least not to loose money. Whose role it is to make sure that the marketers come up with the right tariffs? As a good and old friend of mine once said (when he was still a Billing manager), “every time the marketing guys get drunk, I have a new tariff”.

I would like to think we can all agree, that when the tariff is wrong, and costs the business money, that finding leakage related to the tariff is less important than understanding why the business chose a bad tariff to begin with. I’m quite puzzled by the fact that I can’t recall a single telco where RA helps to evaluate which tariffs to launch and which tariffs to scratch.

I guess I don’t understand how a data source be marked as primary or secondary, and who decides which is which.

I will illustrate my question with the following scenario in an area where I have some understanding: identifying billing verification (BV) discrepancies. Sometimes best practice is to model the tariff as defined at the physical contract with the end customer, and model the tariff as defined in the billing system, and model the tariff as defined on the website of the operator, and model the tariff as filed with the legal department and more… Now we can take these variants and conduct a parallel run and see if there are any discrepancies between the various dialects of what should be single version tariff spec.

How would you mark each version? Which is prime and which is secondary? IMHO for proper BV you want to model all, regardless. The end result of this exercise should be a single tariff definition company wide.

Apart from people randomly copying in other people on totally irrelevant emails, executive indecision is the single greatest curse of working life.

Wearing until recently an RA vendor hat, I was always puzzled by the (in)decision making process in many telcos. While it is evident that in many cases RA projects demonstrate financial merits which are usually easily quantifiable, it was always a challenge for me to understand the pathetic indecision phenomenon. The lamentable part of this paradigm is that the monthly revenue loss, which usually cannot be claimed back from the customers, is piling up and the overall system cost of a typical RA solution is often less than the monthly expenditure of the telco on bathroom tissue.

I was rather unimpressed by the full scale decision paralysis and an inability to action. The only thing brought into being are hundreds of pointless meeting where reports and judgments are made. I hope I’m wrong, but how else could someone explain to me the fact that a sales cycle of an RA system lasts for an average 15 months, for a system that costs less than a monthly expenditure on bathroom tissue, while not considering the daily leakage, which usually cannot be reclaimed a posteriori.