When advising people on what I am looking for in revenue assurance, sometimes I find it easiest to use metaphors. The right metaphor has the advantage of conveying an involved idea very succinctly, though as with any abstraction, a poor choice can be misleading. One of my favourite metaphors is to the metaphor of health. We want our patient, the telco, to be healthy, and RA plays the role of a doctor. A poor doctor treats symptoms – waits for leaks to occur and then tries to recover them. A good doctor treats the disease itself – the root causes of leakage – so there are no illnesses, and no symptoms, any more.
This excellent article in Connected Planet Online really impressed me, because it talks about where revenue assurance should really be headed. It talks about transforming businesses so services are delivered right first time, pleasing customers, saving costs, and spelling an end to the culture which says leakage is inevitable. As I read it, I was trying to think of the right way to sum it up, but it is so well written that it is hard to convey its many-layered message any more succinctly or elegantly than the article already does, without losing some of its flavour. So let me just use a metaphor. If good revenue assurance is about making a business healthy, then the article says that you need revenue assurance right in the bones of the business, and should not treat it as a cosmetic that you apply to the skin. We need to get inside our telcos, changing it from the inside out. Only then will revenue assurance have delivered the optimal benefit to the business.
