A Long, Sustainable Career in Revenue Assurance

When I was at a conference in London recently, I heard many Revenue Assurance professionals (most from western European telcos) saying they had revenue risk and leakage relatively well controlled, so they were no longer discovering or recovering huge amounts of leakage. They regarded this as bad news. Others who were not in that position, and still discovering large amounts of leakage, also seemed worried when they heard this.


And this is the real worry many of us face in doing the Revenue Assurance job. If I end up being really good at my job, am I really working myself out of a job? If I find revenue risk wherever it may be, and I not only recover leakage, but properly control risk so it stops being a problem, am I making my job more difficult? Will I get to the point where I’m doing so well, I make my position one that no longer delivers value?

The thing is, I hear this concern all the time and I’m here to tell you the answer is absolutely not!

The way I see the Revenue Assurance profession is that it is so important to the telco, it will never be “optional.” Telcos are always going to need Revenue Assurance professionals. This is because the skills we have are so unique and so useful – and what we do delivers so much value for so little budget and headcount, that as long as we understand what our real job is and how to do it well, we are always going to be valuable to our organizations.

Part of how the telcos I’ve talked about got into this position, where their budgets were being questioned because they were no longer recovering huge leakages, is because their Key Performance Indicator (KPI) was leakage.

They had been measured on the amount of leakage in the telco, and when that measure went down, it supposedly meant they were doing a better and better job. But at a certain point, the amount of leakage was so low, there was very little they could do to “do better.”

I don’t think this is because the professionals in those departments suddenly stopped being good at their jobs, far from it, I think it is because leakage is not a useful measure of what Revenue Assurance does.

First of all, the most unique skill Revenue Assurance professionals have is our ability to apply forensics – we are very good at identifying risk, quantifying risk, and then, if management says that risk is too high, creating controls to monitor the risk.

Monitoring those controls, and keeping track of them, is not necessarily part of our core competency and should be handled by the departments who have operational responsibility.

If there needs to be a control on Billing or Mediation, Billing or Mediation should be the ones monitoring the controls. Those are their departments, and they have to be responsible for them. We as Revenue Assurance can help, but we cannot do their job for them.

So a more useful measure of how well Revenue Assurance is doing, is the amount of forensic work it is doing – bringing in cases, looking at incidents and alarms, and investigating.

Another good measure of how well Revenue Assurance is doing is, instead of looking at leakage, to look at Revenue at Risk. This is because Revenue at Risk measures how much potential leakage has been controlled based on the controls implemented. I’ll talk about the details on how to calculate Revenue at Risk in another blog post, or you can refer to our standards book, but clearly it is a positive way of measuring Revenue Assurance rather than the negative measure of leakage.

But it is not just about new ways of measuring what Revenue Assurance does, it is also about understanding the true value Revenue Assurance brings to the telco.

Especially when revenue risk is well controlled, that should be an opportunity to expand the scope of the department to do more things – not spend more money doing something you already do well. Because in that situation, not only should you be looking to spend less on your traditional activities, you should be moving on to higher value targets where your unique skills can be of most help.

And we see GRAPA members doing this wherever we go – they are not only performing forensics and looking for margin losses in interconnect and roaming, they are assuring margins on assets such as BTSs and other infrastructure components. They are introducing finance controls on marketing to get that process under control so that there are fewer failed campaigns, and more campaigns that are more successful.

But the greatest success stories we hear about are when GRAPA members assist with new product development. And when they do so they are not just making sure from the beginning that these new products are billable or assurable – sometimes they are even part of the decision not to do so in order to bring products to market faster. In other situations they are even making this process go faster because they have more end-to-end knowledge of the revenue stream than anyone else does in their “silo.” They have this knowledge because they have a full view of revenue risk across the organization – because it is what they do.

So I think if you are good at what you do but are at all worried about your job or your position in your telco, I’m telling you not to worry. What you do is so important that the only way you can end up in trouble is if you don’t really understand what you do and how you should be doing it. But once you know that, you’ll be able to deliver value to your telco for years and years to come.

That’s why I LOVE Revenue Assurance.

I know I’ve brought up a lot of different issues without elaborating on them in detail – but don’t worry, that’s what I’ll be trying to do in the weeks to come!