Mike Willett

Mike Willett

Mike Willett is the current Director for Fraud & Revenue Assurance at Telstra Corporation Ltd in Australia. He has over 10 years experience in fraud and revenue assurance matters specific to the telecommunications industry.

Mike graduated from the University of Auckland in New Zealand with degrees in psychology and marketing. He started his career at BellSouth (now Vodafone) in New Zealand and then moved to Praesidium Services in the UK. During that time, he had the opportunity to consult with a number of service providers and vendors around the world and see how RA is perceived and managed (and mismanaged) in a number of different operating and cultural environments.

Mike has been at Telstra now for 5 years and leads the fraud and revenue assurance function in the current times of great organisational change. His interest is both in understanding theoretical approaches to improve revenue assurance outcomes but more importantly in how these can be practically implemented to provide tangible and recognisable business value.

25 11 2008

Revenue Assurance for Corporate Customers

Posted by: Mike Willett in Main

This post is not so much a commentary but more a call out for some assistance.

Imagine that your telco has 1,000 corporate customers, all with individually negotiated tariffs across the full set of products and services you provide. The details reside in multiple contracts and variations with discounting provided at many different levels - service, product, account, location - all dependent on what is negotiated with the customer. This has resulted in a mix of standard and customised pricing structures and solutions within the billing environment to meet the contractural obligations for charging.

Now imagine, you are asked to provide revenue assurance validation over these customers to state that there is neither over nor undercharge or, if there is, to identify it precisely so it can be addressed. One way is to extract the bills, extract each contract and then compare the billing system output with what is expected based on the contract. However, this is often a cumbersome process that takes time and effort and, due to the individual nature of each contract, there is very little room to extrapolate the findings from one customer across to all.

My question is, how would you go about providing revenue assurance in this instance?

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31 10 2008

Double Billing

Posted by: Mike Willett in Main

I was talking today to a colleague, whose name, role and company best be kept anonymous, and they advised me a recent incident where their RA vendor issued two bills, for the (exactly) same service, to different parts of the company. These two parts of the company were both expecting an invoice due to internal hand-overs taking place at the time and so both authorised and made the payment. This was only picked up some time later, by chance, when the two people met on something else and it got raised.

All of which raises a number of interesting questions. Firstly, how does a company selling RA products/services which help telcos reconcile high volume, low value transactions across complex network, mediation and billing domains, then not get their own low volume, high value billing right? Secondly, if an RA vendor is doing this (accidental or deliberate, it doesn’t matter), how much more might it be occurring? Third and lastly, I am a fan that RA focus on “revenue” not cost as I believe there is enough complexity in that alone but I am sure an RA methodology could be applied to proactively identify these instances. Now that would lead to an interesting discussion - “we used the RA product/service you provided to find a leakage/loss associated with the RA product/service you provided”.

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12 09 2008

New arrival checking in…

Posted by: Mike Willett in Main

Hello everyone,

My name is Mike Willett and I am writing to you from Australia. Firstly, my thanks to Eric and the talkRA team for providing the opportunity for me to write a blog. Reading the current posts, I can only hope to provide as much intellectual insight and thought to you as the current crop of bloggers have provided to me.

In RA today, there is much discussion about the techniques for finding revenue leakage - the tools to use, where to look, how to use them.  But what I started thinking about tonight is what are the attributes that differentiate high performing RA teams or individuals.

The answer will draw heavily on how you approach your RA work. I have a heavy bias towards a data analysis orientated approach (in comparison to a process improvement approach) so let me call that bias out. Let me also point out though that a team biased solely on data analytics expertise is not likely to succeed without other supporting areas.  I want, however, to focus not on the skills and experience but on the innate talents or the things you can’t teach.

For me, then there are a few essential attributes.

Resilience - I find this is key throughout the entire process from trying to acquire the necessary data and business rules to do the work, working through the analysis itself, understanding what is real leakage and what is noise and then advocating for any leakages to be appropriately addressed.

Integity - data may not lie but if the RA team starts to make assumptions that it shouldn’t, doesn’t question its approach, doesn’t question the data it is getting then it can very easily start presenting false positive results. When RA speaks, you want people to listen, not switch off.

Flexibility - time and again what you set out to do and how you want to do it can easily be deemed impractical once the data starts arriving (or doesn’t as the case may be). To be able to answer the frustratingly simple question “am I losing money here?” requires a clear focus and ability to adapt.

When you have a team with these attributes and the right strategic direction and support, then maybe, to steal from Eric, the caterpillar might well become a butterfly.

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