Reaping benefit of having news feeds from Google on key words, I get to know a lot of publications on revenue management across the globe. So Thanks to Google, this article here caught my attention — almost instantly! “Mobile network operators face losing $300 billion due to fraud and billing error“– so says the heading. Now that is a scary number….. USD $ 300 BILLION!!!! or is it??

I am not sure as to how to react to such figures. Having worked with revenue management vendors, I can safely say, it is extremely hard to get the actual numbers from the operators. For most purposes, even if the operators praise the product and acknowledges the benefits they have obtained as ROI, I have hardly met an operator who allows publishing the actual numbers of leakage/RA FM loss/ ROI from the revenue management product. Well, as a product manager I can say it definitely gets irritating at times when I cannot proclaim the actual benefits of my product even when I know of the benefits.

This situation or when I read of such numbers makes me question the authenticity of such numbers, and hence in this short post I seek Your comments to the extent of leakage that You may have seen in real life – actual numbers!

I lifted this title for the post directly lifted from the book ‘Switch’, because there could not be a better way to start the last part of the three posts on an overview of “Customer Experience Management” I had been writing. The other two parts were :(1) A further step ahead with Customer Experience Management and (2) Challenges to mitigate in the New Age of Customer Experience with ‘connected’ applications.

In this post I wanted to highlight a basic behavior of consumers, which as a matter of fact is completely dependent on economic factors and geography. The reason I speak of geography and economy being two major factors is because the definitions of millionaires, middle-class, and destitute are very different across the geography and that drives to a large extent the customer experience and the expectations from the same. Imagine this, the middle class of Europe is no where comparable to a vast economy like India, because the population distribution in India may be summarized as:

1. The Very Rich = 6 million
2a. The Consuming Class = 150 million
2b. The Climbers = 275 million
2c. The Aspirants = 275 million
3. Destitudes = 210 million

2a, 2b, 2c form the Mythical Middle Class of India. This was never a single sect in India. [The numbers date back some 10-12 year back when the population of India was around 900 million. The numbers have increased but the sects remain primarily the same].

So in this diversity, one of the factors that play significant role is the effect of ‘Status’ in the minds of the consumers. As a matter of fact the same has been seen by the multi-national brands of garments and cosmetics who have swarmed India. Being able to use a potentially costly service/item is almost a status-symbol to large sects of the geography. So, it is very common to “show off” a costly mobile or a 3G data speed connection in a no-so-affluent location. This is one of the traits of the human mind and definitely is tickled by the economy of the region.

This brings me to saying, when Customer Experience Management is measured by the telecom operators or other businesses alike, it is important to understand the ‘sentiments’ (which unfortunately is not a measurable component) of the people who are using the particular ‘service’, and that definitely is based on:

1. economy of the region
2. geographical conditions (dont expect an African pygmy living in the forests to go ga-ga over a Tommy Hilfiger outfit.
3. educational background and the diversity
4. (probably) the most important un-measurable component “sentiment of status symbol”

Hence, Customer Experience Management (apart from the quantifiable metrics) would have to take care of these softer aspects for a sustainable business.

The buzz word for the immediate next future is “the internet of things” where appliances are all inter-connected in one large network. Today we talk of smart phones, but soon enough we would be living in a reality of smart-ACs, smart-refrigerators and so on. Such ‘connected’ appliances and applications is definitely bound to make lives of the customers simpler which means the smart phone of today would become the quintessential all in one device working on an extremely complex network serving a broad economic chain with providers and consumers interacting over this large ‘web’.

In order to enable this vision from the future as has been often showcased in Sci-Fi movies and books; a number of significant challenges need a thorough review. A few such challenges are:

1. Not TBs but Petabytes or more even volumes of data: The problem is, even today making sense out of the data is a titanic issue. Imagine managing such gigantic volumes.
2. Resource requirements: Obviously energy consumed for processing and maintaining such volumes would be way too high. Carbon foot-print reduction would then become the next big challenge.
3. Cost benefits and Pricing: A connected planet is an ideal dream- but everything comes at a cost. So, would the investments in such efforts be good risks to take. Especially following the Moore curve, has the largest share of users in the late phases. So understanding the breakeven would be a good point. Not only that, the changes to the complete economics of communication would be interesting to keep a note of.
4. Economics of Scale: The best bid would be to encash on Economics of Scale than waiting for the early adopters or even the late adopters. Penetration rates into the population therefore would be a significant metric for understanding profitability of operations. Another related topic to understand would be the economic divisions in the different countries. That would be a driving factor for understanding penetration rates- simply because a thorough reach out to the destitutes would definitely mean reducing the price for increasing accessibility- which in return would have low contribution to top-line, and with rising costs and additional costs- the margin for having a sustainable business may be found to be diminishing. This is the same situation as we currently see with competitive price wars among telcos.
5. Data privacy issues: A connected planet would be a paradise for hackers and fraudulent vermin. Imagine tackling petabytes of personal information keeping fraudsters at bay is a dream for most operators. Effectively, the personal security of the consumers could be at stake if data is hacked.
6. Information Usability for the End Users: With such connected devices, usability of the information derived for the consumers from these petabytes of data would be a key concern. More so because there would definitely be the need of cognitive interfaces for addressing the different educational backgrounds.
7. The Killer called ‘Competition’ : The first mover advantage does not help in this ever converging world, and this is not a new fact

A recent article on had the caption “Social media breathes new life into live TV”. This article definitely provides the reasons for a call to action for deeper understanding of consumers. Not “one” but a number of stakeholders would benefit out of this. Here are 5 such stake holders!

1. Content providers: they would know what the consumers are talking about in the form of likes and dislikes.
2. TV Soap and Serial Producers & Intellectual Content Creators: No doubt soaps and serials are a large part of TV viewing, but along with that channels like National Geography and History tend to get a better understanding of the taste of the audience, while in countries like India, where soaps are an extremely large part of television content, audience preferences would definitely drive the direction of the story! Good or bad – would be a different problem to analyze.
3. Advertisers: the more focused content the more better turnaround on advertisement spending.
4. Operators: In providing the backbone for all services, they tend to gain from all sides- consumers on one hand, and all the other parties on the other hand. Revenues on the rise!
5. Consumers: No doubt consumers would be willing to pay (if required) ‘a little more’ to get the benefits all in one place- TV, social media communication, telephonic communication channels, value added services et al- and most importantly getting rid of tens of bill payments; all to be replaced by a single bill from a single provider. It’s simply much more convenient as a consumer!

When profits are to decline 85% in 2011-12, the cause of sustainability of business is burning the need of the hour. Review this article on the Indian telecom space- the second largest on this planet after China.. The chief reasons are attributed to:

1. higher depreciation charges due to the heavy borrowings for acquiring 3G licences and rolling out 3G services
2. Over spending on infrastructure
3. Hyper competition

The articles states “The total number of telephones has increased from 429.73 million on 31st March 2009 to 926.55 million on 31st December 2011.

The growth of wireless connections has been phenomenal, reaching 893.86 million connections at the end of December 2011. As a result, the share of wireless telephones has increased from 80.3 per cent in March 2007 to 96.4 percent in December 2011.”

These are staggering “growth” numbers, but what good is growth when the operators are cash strapped? I had learnt- “revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is reality”!

Often we have debated on the scope of Revenue Assurance, but here is a clear case where the task of RA has to simply outgrow from only making sure that leakages are fixed to actually ensuring that the bottom line is held in place while concentrating on the top line. As a matter of fact, according to ABI Research’s new study, “Indian Mobile Broadband Market,” Indian operators are executing a number of initiatives: offloading their capital and operating expenditure-intensive base station towers to tower management companies; forging relationships with not just Nokia, Samsung, and LG, but also lower cost handset manufacturers such as Huawei, ZTE, Micromax, and G’Five; repackaging their data plans into more affordable, lower-tier options; introducing not just low-cost tablets, but also 3G data plans; and encouraging “local” apps developers to create “local” software apps and content. Essentially the focus of cost containment is in place, and therefore it becomes even more important for RA teams to get real and account for both top lines and bottom lines.

It is time to get the ‘cash’ in place only to ensure business sustains!

I introduced RevenuePad and the RA ‘clock’ in parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series. This is the conclusion of my series.

Epilogue: It’s time for Benjamin to follow and embrace natural growth.

In this final part, first let me explain, how RevenuePad enables ‘specific attention’ for RA teams all of whom may have different needs under the same problem areas. RevenuePad enables replicating the business structure of the organization, with an additional capability that allows custom monitoring for each and every business node beyond the quantitative parameters that RevenuePad already monitors. Let me take an example: Our hands have 5 fingers each, all of which are different with different capabilities, although they belong to the same ‘wrist’. Similarly, although the overall quantification parameters for all business nodes for an operator may be same, each node may have a specific need. RevenuePad allows creating and monitoring these custom metrics that uniquely identify and help gauge the situation at the business nodes. It is not necessary for the RA teams to use this capability for monitoring only performance of the node/nodes. As I mentioned earlier, RevenuePad has a framework approach. It is ‘this’ capability that would allow customizing the necessary information for the business.

The purpose of RevenuePad is to ensure productivity of the RA departments. We all accept that it is not the best format to have analysts’ spend 80% of their time to simple detect problems, and then try to fix the. The growth of telecom as a domain does not demand hard work, it demands ‘smart work’. It is time, analysts spend 20% of crucial time in knowing the 80% of the problems, so that the rest of the time can be spent for fixing the leakages and recovering the lost revenue. That is what takes time, and that is where a true RA functions would need to be. One of India’s greatest freedom fighters and ex-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said “Action to be effective must be directed to clearly conceived ends”. Hence for TEAM RA, its time to grow beyond the conventional approaches for working just to ensure that they do not face an identity crisis in trying to prove their merit. With the economic condition across the globe, it becomes even more imperative for RA to take up more than switch to bill reconciliations.

The need of the hour for Benjamin is to use his time-reversal clock to scale and grow, rather than wilt away.