Lebara Mobile has chosen Aricent Group for Revenue Assurance in 7 countries and therefore a press release was quite in order. The last line in the first paragraph reads:

The multi-country solution has ended revenue leakage and reduced operating expenditure through a more agile and responsive IT infrastructure.

I must have missed the memo. We have advanced to the level of ending revenue leakages! And this is not just a possibility – it has already happened.

I just imagined myself as RA manager having this conversation with my CFO.

Me (leaning forward): Sir,I am committing my efforts to eliminating revenue leakage.

CFO: Oh, you don’t say!

Me: Totally abolish it. I will leave no stone unturned.  I mean, no CDR unaccounted for.

CFO: By when?

Me: End of current financial year.

CFO: You do realize we are in Feb and our financial year ends on 31st Mar?

Me: I am well aware. That’s why we just upgraded our RA tool.

CFO: My prayers are with you.

Me: Thanks. What’s that list that you are scrutinizing?

CFO: It’s just a list of people we wish to get rid of.

Me: We are downsizing?

CFO: No, we are just getting rid of bull-shitters and peddlers of hog-wash.

Me: Looks like it has 39 people. Those idiots are that many?

CFO: You have no idea. I will shortly add the 40th person as soon as you close the door behind you.

Me: If we can eliminate revenue leakages and also get rid of those 40 pests, this company will be on its way to the big league.

CFO: It sure will.

Me: OK. See you later

CFO: Don’t count on it.

I exit the office wondering what he meant by that last statement. But I cant be bothered. I am going to eliminate revenue leakage.

Eric’s post on Kicking Risk’s Bottom got me thinking. I am also interested in one angle to this whole bottom-kicking business for very personal reasons. My reasons are career impacting I might add! A few weeks ago, yours truly together with my able team members, in a move inspired by free liquor courtesy of the monthly drink-up, decided that we needed to come up with a one page document that summarizes the indicators of the top 10 risks facing the company. The thinking behind it? Simple: we wanted to know and show how well we (as a company ) are doing in kicking risk’s bottom and to show in a very succinct manner, how far we were yet to go on this kick-ass journey, if I may use Eric’s lingo. Something went very wrong in this whole exercise. For one, there was debate as to what really constitutes a risk indicator. And you have to agree that the term sounds very simple and very enlightened but when you really think of it, what does it stand for?

We have a set of risks, presumably identified through some process of assessment. What do we want to track about these risks? How relevant they are? The efficacy of the controls that we have put in place i.e. how apt, how well implemented? Do we also want to identify where the controls are stifling business? I mean, it is a common saying that opportunity and risk are two sides of the same coin. Is there truly one indicator for one risk or will a set of indicators be necessary for one risk? The mother of all debates (I will not comment on her bottom contrary to what some readers may expect), showed up when we started discussing the difference between what is an operational indicator i.e. normal business stuff and what should be taken as a risk indicator? If management has defined a set of closely-watched numbers for example, is it possible that the risk indicators were already inadvertently included in this i.e. risk indicators are simply a subset of operational indicators. The assumption being that diligent management teams would already be managing risk as part and parcel of whatever it is that they do between their trips to the golf course?

Supposing, for example, that we decided we shall use reported leakage as a risk indicator? What does it indicate? If the amount of reported leakage goes up, does it indicate that we have process and data integrity issues that are worsening and therefore more leakage? Or does it indicate that our RA team is stepping up in performance of RA checks and therefore identifying more leakages. So it would be arguable that while the figures may be getting scarier, we are now in deed in a better position i.e. in a sense our RA folks stepping up is only now showing that we should celebrate?

Every now and then we meet at the water-cooler and discuss this. I am sad to announce that we have progressively moved from our initial state of inebriation to a state that I can only describe as desolate. There are many questions, even more opinions but few answers.  I have thus suggested that we need to raise the frequency and duration of our drink-up sessions in order to ensure that like-minded team members engage in an environment that is free of distractions and away from the constrictions of the office space.  I am not sure why the boss is not so enthusiastic on this idea. I suspect it’s because we are still expected to reach an intelligent consensus and submit in the next few days, the risk indicators.  If we don’t, a sharp boot will make contact with some very hapless and confused bottoms!  However, should we succeed, I guarantee we shall publish a good read: Battling the Ballooning Bottoms: The Kick-Ass Guide for Risk Managers.

For several months (maybe a year), I have not visited the ABIS & Associates website. I was thus surprised when I visited and found the following message at the homepage:

The Directors of ABIS and Associates Limited decided the company would cease trading as from 31st January 2011. Most of the services provided by ABIS & Associates Ltd may continue to be provided by our former employees and associates acting as independent consultants. Our web site will remain operational until further notice as an indication of the services and expertise available.

Members of RA fraternity who had the privilege of interacting with David Smith of ABIS would likely tell of his deep knowledge, flawless execution and the high quality which was characteristic of all his engagements. He is, in my view, a zero-BS consultant who is honestly passionate about enabling people rise to the best that they can. We have a shortage of such people. I was fortunate to have been David’s pupil during one of his many RA trainings.

I do not have details as to why ABIS ceased trading but I certainly hope David is still doing what he was doing best (and so are his colleagues) so that the spirit of ABIS will live on. And I dare hope that the many snake-oil salesmen who package all manner of gibberish as RA accreditations and issue shiny pieces of paper certifying everything except true understanding will take a leaf from ABIS.

Everybody likes standardized ways of working. There is comfort in saying:

- We do this as a standard practice

- Our processes are standardized

- We have a standard template for this

Go on, say it out loud. I guarantee you will feel very accomplished.

So, if you are running a group operation overseeing 10, 20 or 30 odd countries, it makes you feel even greater, when you send out a template for guiding a standardized way of doing RA in the countries that your company operates in. This may even conveniently ignore the nuances of the processes, systems and people in each of the end markets. Spare no effort, make sure the Excel worksheet is color-coded and extremely complex. At specific cells, include scary formulae (STDEV, IFERROR, FACTDOUBLE, MULTINOMIAL and MINVERSE) in order to strike fear in the guys who are filling in the returns at end month.  Well, who stops to ask whether we need to standardize everything? I do not have the figures (ahem, Big 4, take cue and do a study on this) but some leakages are detected because people thought a little more outside of the confines of the formal activity universe of RA. Even in human history, it is the people who conformed the least that we remember the most.

Granted, we may not really want to allow RA to run in a cow-boy fashion entirely. Neither are we are  outlaws but the group office sheriffs who keep asking for compliance to templates also have the tendency to keep pontificating and talking down at the  end market staff with little regard for insights from the man who has his hands on the plough. These turn-coats (some who were once working at end-markets) will one day breed a very mean contingent of rogue RA practitioners who will go on to begin an underground movement that makes talkRA gadfly Eric look like a saint. The end-market plough-holders might break loose and unleash untold misery on the Group office bureaucrats who insist on Excel worksheets being completed in a certain manner. And how will they do that? By quantifying the amount of leakage identified through adherence to the template and the amount of leakage that is identified through responsible use of leeway, creativity and imagination. Heck, these miscreants may even show the success that they have achieved by outright disobedience to the communicated templates! The figures may surprise us.

Standardizing and templates are good for Group office arm-chair RA types, but sometimes not so good for the guy in the trenches who is forced to fill 1000 checklists. Should he spend this time identifying and driving the plugging of leakages or doing paperwork? After all is said (at group) and done at (end market), are we better off or worse off? And so it happens that rather than control flights of fancy, standardization becomes a burden. RA departments then start spending time shuffling between this and that template and justifying why this and that task was not done. In a sense, this was always going to happen. Human beings have the tendency to take something good and proceed to mangle and twist and smother it until it becomes a problem. To my simplistic mind, it is due to this very tendency that we found a way to convert plants which would be innocently growing in their natural habitat into a global narcotics problem.

I say forget these blanket standardized templates and the whole flurry of make-believe governance that goes with them. Forget these impressive-on-paper but meager-delivery standard RA coverage maps that we have all become so fond of. Reduce the toll they take on the real RA worker. At most, provide a common core of very generic controls that might apply on every market and make sure that the execution of the same can reasonably and adequately be done within 40% of the (wo)mandays that RA has. Even with these suggested minimalist generic controls that are informative as opposed to being mandatory, let the end market determine which ones are necessary. Then, let 60% of the RA time be spent on customized approaches to areas of greatest need that the guys on the frontline determine to warrant attention. After all, when the music stops, these are the people who are left with no chairs and if they can clearly rationalize why effort was applied to certain areas as opposed to others, shouldn’t they have adequate leeway then?

If we invested less in issuing  and driving compliance to standard RA templates and more in knowledge share and critiques across countries, operators and vendors, I suspect what would happen is that the RA work-environment would balance itself through infusion of the best ideas, the most optimum practices, the most relevant controls and comparison of outcomes. Natural selection will ultimately leave us with only what we need by dropping what we do not need.  We would achieve standardization of approaches while still allowing healthy self-expression. In a sense, an accidental standardization may check in. I don’t know where such an eventuality would leave the group-office bureaucrats but hey, I like that better.

Disclosure:  I would like to point out that as much as I work at a group office. I am not guilty of the ills I have pointed out here.

A recent thread at talkRA turned to a discussion about the boredom that has become characteristic of RA conferences. I am inclined to agree with Eric’s comment that there is generally a lack of sharing of ideas and information, especially from telcos. This made me think of several characters (from telcos and elsewhere) that you will spot at any RA conference. Normally, it is still the same set of characters that you find in this post, but the conference environment shines a different light on them.

The Know it All:  Everybody is wrong except him. No problem is resolved without his say and no topic can be closed before his final word. He is interesting at first and can get a good debate going until he falls madly in love with his own voice. Sadly, whatever value he could add to the conference is quickly undone since the audience never gets a chance to ask anything.

The Know Nothing: No clue and no interest in learning anything (about RA) but if you mention extra-curricular activities, his face will light up. It is possible that he attended the conference as a brief interlude to his shopping trip. Occasionally, you may catch him scowling at the presenter. Later, you will definitely bump into him at the airport with his bag full of duty-free wine bottles and all manner of artifacts. If you are looking for ideas on where to go for disco, bungee jumping, late night chemists, best acupuncture and other manner of services unrelated to the conference but specific to the locality, look no further. I guarantee you that your able guide is here.

The Share Nothing: Possibly an expert is his field, well-accomplished but detests sharing any knowledge. The mild case of this affliction manifests itself in hiding details such as which telco he works for, his role or even how he traveled to the conference (you would think these are state secrets). The severe case of this malady can make the sufferer refuse to tell you the time by his watch. Spotting this character is easy- as soon as he receives the name tag, he stuffs it in his shirt-pocket or inverts it. During coffee break, you may mention that you are launching a new product and it happens that in his market, such a product was launched a while back and resulted in massive revenue leakages before being fixed. His eyes will light up with interest but he will say nothing. There is an air of secrecy around him and he keeps furtively looking over his shoulder. At the dinner table, if you need the salt shaker, you had better reach for it yourself. It is possible that he had a difficult childhood but that does not prevent us from bequeathing him the trophy of RA Lowlife, a bizarre creature in deed.

The Question Asker: This character has a question every time about anything. The tragedy is that all his questions can be answered via a simple Google search. What do you mean by BI? What is Answer Seizure Ratio? What is the difference between a leakage and a loss? Is cloud computing the same as distributed computing? Jeez, while we are at it, why not ask if the hotel staff intend to change the tablecloths for dinner? If there are two microphones in the audience, one of them should be permanently tethered to the Question Asker’s table. He will sometimes ask a very valuable question but do not hold your breath.

The Rephraser: This guy can drive a presenter up the wall, punctuating the presentation every 2 minutes with an ill-timed comment. He typically starts his sentences with:

 “If I may interject, just to put this in perspective…”

 “Let me see if I get what you mean…”

“If I could just restate what you said in order to make it clearer for the rest of the people here who may not know what you meant…” – very charitable fellow in deed.

“If you could just go back to slide 79, no, I mean slide 75….OK, now that we are  at slide 79 anyway, let me just repeat the sticky points from it before we head to slide 75”. Dude, we all heard the points!

If conference timings are not adhered to, the blame can be assigned to the culprits as follows: the Question Asker (40%) and the Rephraser (60%).

The Whiner: He has a complaint about everything- the agenda, seating arrangement, lighting, meals, airport runways, food, even the doorbell. Give him time and he will prove that even the sun is rising from the wrong direction. You lose absolutely nothing by sitting away from him. However, should you wish to make his day, just mention that last night, you noticed the moon was darker than usual and you intend to take up this matter with the conference organizers urgently.

The Absentee: He flew in two days before the conference, checked in to his room and disappeared. He will be back to the hotel to check out and catch a cab to the airport (two days after the end of the conference). He arrived at dusk and will depart at dawn. Nobody knows his name, where he came from, what he has been up to or where he is headed to. For all we know, he could be a national security agent. The only audit trail is in the form of hotel records and boarding passes but we are not sure that was his real name anyway.

The Geek: The geek is forever on his laptop, iPhone, iPad, Kindle and generally any device that possesses enough battery life to enable his quest to distract and annoy anybody in his vicinity. He is usually the first one to know where to get the strongest Wi-Fi signal. It does not matter what is going on in the conference, the roof could come down for all he cares. Amidst all the conference activities, the geek is typing and texting away stuff that is unrelated to what is going on. He may have earphones, in which case he won’t mind watching a couple of videos. At mealtimes, you may catch him hauling off food (mostly tuna sandwiches) from the eating place to the conference room. If there is a lingering smell of fish in the conference room, now you know who to blame. In summary, the geek is physically present but logically absent.

The Delegate: He shares what he has (ideas, knowledge and questions), accepts nothing on face-value and listens to those who have something of value. He is careful not to impose and learns from his more accomplished peers while carefully guiding those of less experience. He takes the conference as a welcome opportunity to engage with vendors, customers, analysts and everybody else around. He immerses himself in new technologies and new methods and ideas yet holds in reverence traditional wisdom. He is an expert at gauging the moods, easing in and out of debate, sharing with those who are receptive and steering clear of those who wish to be left alone. He is not afraid to say that he does not know something and neither does he shy from expressing a different viewpoint even if he may find himself in the minority or completely alone. The Delegate is an observer, teacher and learner all rolled up into one- he will offer his knowledge of the Stowger switch and be ready to be taught about revenue assurance challenges in an IP Multimedia System environment or he may be well-versed in DRM but has no problem listening to tales of Bell and Baby Bells offered by an AT&T veteran. The tragedy of our industry is that he is a dying breed. However, hope is not lost – the Know it All, the Know Nothing, the Share Nothing, the Question Asker, the Rephraser, the Geek and the Whiner may evolve into the Delegate. With regard to the absentee, it might be difficult to make this evolution but do let me know if and when border customs finally catch him.

Me:  Look over your shoulder and I will be right there – I am the diminutive chap in a sombrero hat and shades, adorned with a shaggy beard and an unkempt moustache, complete with white whiskers. An unlit cigar in the mouth is my mark and the smell of tobacco follows me. In my hands will be a tattered coffee-stained, dog-eared notebook and a pen labeled Holiday Inn. I will be watching every step you make, remembering every word you say and noting your mannerisms (especially the bad ones). Therefore, be ye nice to each other; for there is work to be done and you still need each other.

A week ago, I participated in a new program dubbed “In Your Shoes”. This initiative requires each manager to spend two days at a customer-facing point in order to see for oneself what our customers are going through. I thus spent one day at our retail centre in Nairobi CBD and a second day in a town about 50 kilometres from Nairobi. A few weeks ahead of the retail centre visits, I was at the call centre and listened in to some of the calls coming through. To be honest, I was at first sceptical about this whole idea. It struck me as a feel-good opportunity where one spends time commiserating with customers only to get back to the desk having done little and intending to do even less. Some folks, in companies I will not name, have made careers out of market visits, raking up enough per diem to buy villas and Ferraris. Surely, there are better, efficient ways of getting to know the pain points of our customers, I reasoned. I could get a data dump from the CRM system and also look at the trouble tickets escalations that are coming through the support teams. That would give a network-wide view now, wouldn’t it?

I came out of these visits with appreciation of what our retail team goes through. Their jobs are tough, to say the least and it is amazing how well they handle the challenges. Everybody else in the company can mess up and hide in the offices (even Call Centre staff connect to customers from afar) but the retail agent, who is the very face of the telco, stands in for us all). She is engineer, accountant, counsellor, cashier, salesperson, marketer, PR expert and when all else fails, she will do for a punch bag.   It is a shame that we do not always have processes and systems to back this fine team. A slight CRM system downtime, even occasioned by normal connectivity issues, has a very big effect on the queues at the retail centres. Suddenly, the queue stretches to the entrance and starts snaking its way up the street. Voices go up. Tempers flare. A general atmosphere of hostility from the customers starts building up.

The experience also challenged my notions. Seeing peasant farmers who are well advanced in age asking about internet challenges the assumption that some of these services are for the youthful category of the market. The two days also provided a suitable opportunity to pause and ask myself, “Why are we here? Really.” We sell services that do not work as they should. We run systems that make it difficult for retail staff to serve customers. We make promises that we do not keep. I suspect a number of people working for telcos are probably guilty of these transgressions as well. In Nairobi CBD, I witnessed retail staff cowering behind security guards as they informed customers that the system is down hence the customers’ issues cannot be resolved and would the customers please come back after two hours. From the pained expressions and the anger that registered on the customers’ faces scenarios of actual bodily harm came to mind. The program is not called “In Your Shoes” for nothing. In my case, it was more like “Quaking in Your Boots” as I imagined tempers reaching a boiling point – may I add that I was not entirely positive that the company insurance scheme would compensate my family if I happened to be a victim of bare-hands-strangulation by an unidentified customer hence my apprehension is excusable.  I imagined my epitaph:  His demise, while unfortunate and unjustifiable, is wholly understandable. He came, He saw, He got clobbered.

Apparently, some customers have been through this drill so many times that when you approach them and ask if you can assist, they first ask, “So your system is up today?” One lad pulled me aside and suggested that since the customer-facing systems always seem to have a problem, we should consider borrowing the system that our competitor is using – you have to admire this kind of out-of-the-box thinking!  I nodded and considered replying that we are giving serious thought to this idea but decided not to push my luck. Radical ideas aside, one begins to come to terms with the frustrations that the customers and the customer-care team are going through. The sad summary is that the tired customers who are queuing with the hope of having their problems solved are an indictment of the CSP’s systems, processes and people with regard to the promise of one or more products. We can achieve 99.99% billing accuracy by use of sophisticated Online Charging Systems but if one customer-facing system or process is not OK, the 99.99% accuracy rate counts for little in deed.

To avoid the program becoming an exercise in futility, I think it is advisable to use it as a learning opportunity that re-evaluates some of the monitoring points that RA is looking at. If 3 out of 5 customers are at the retail point because of a provisioning-related issue affecting prepay data SIMs, it certainly makes sense to spare some effort for this area. If 2 out of 5 customers are bitterly complaining that they cannot exit a daily subscription service that is “eating” their airtime, there is a problem right there. Even without going granular, trends start to emerge. Step by step, some things become clearer and one starts to question even the efficacy of some of the controls that are in place. Some customers are also on the queue because of processes that have excessive controls. Are the controls all necessary? Red tape is danger – if something requires back-office approval by 2 or more people, the flow of service soon breaks.

During encounters with customers, the logic of some of the processes becomes reproachable. Take the case of a customer who has returned a handset for repair. He is issued with an acknowledgement form and has to wait 14 working days. That is the SLA. Sometimes it takes 2 days to repair the handset but since the customer was told to wait for 14 working days, he will only come on the 14^th day (more likely, the 15^th day). Perhaps a mechanism to notify customers once the handset is ready through a designated contact number would be helpful. Recall that not many customers have the luxury of 2 handsets. The handset is now intricately linked to the socio-economic lives of the customers and 14 days without it translates to hell. For a population that is largely living below a dollar a day, those 14 days may now be a zero-dollar-a-day hell. Consider the case of a customer who has visited the retail centre to inform the CSP of some fraudulent activities being perpetrated by a few rogue dealers downtown. Do you really want to ask this person to queue behind 50 individuals in order to get to the point where this information will be keyed into the system? Dare you suggest that and he promptly stomps off. Can you blame him? Wouldn’t a well-publicised toll-free number for reporting such frauds work better?

Truth be told, you can look at the CRM system reports and analyze all the tickets you want but if you want to have an inkling of what your customer thinks and feels, perhaps you should, every now and then, also face the customer across the counter and really listen. It is during such times that one realizes what misery results from skipping one provisioning step and not detecting in good time. It is during such times that one notices the queue building up because there is a customer identity vetting process that requires the retail agent top open two screens and painstakingly copy details from 10 different fields across. It is during such visits that you realize the customer is really patient and has given you a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance… and you wonder if the nth time is round the corner before he lunges across the counter with the intention of squeezing you by the neck until your eyeballs pop out.

 It is also during such times that you realize that the revenue assurance team, with its wealth of experience in data quality and process reviews, can apply some of those skills to make a difference to at least some of the people standing in front of you.

If you have the will to take the necessary follow-up actions, rest assured the customer is talking. Is anyone listening?