Revenue assurance can make reference to a wide range of occupations and activities within the telecom assurance industry. Specifically, revenue assurance is defined within the telecom industry as the practical response to both noticeable and absolute issues with under performance of operations as they relate to the collection of revenue, as well as the management and billing of revenue. It can also make reference to a certain activity completed by a telecommunication service provider or a small business unit that deals with such activities.
This means that, hinging on a particular corporation's structure, revenue assurance can be either a separate department -OR- a broad set of responsibilities that are delegated to several different departments or business units. There are four different criterion that decide what precisely falls inside the spectrum of revenue assurance amongst telecommunications providers:
- The cross-functional elements of revenue assurance, which involves several skills drawn from finance, marketing, IT, and other departments.
- The complexity of generalizing across units and organizations with differing objectives, structures, and models.
-Internal political conflict concerning the responsibility for billing assurance, telecom fraud, revenue leakages, and so forth.
- The intricacy of accurately quantifying the value added by revenue assurance outside of that involving underlying performance.
Needless to say, the goals and techniques of revenue assurance vary widely, and no real consensus has been obtained with regard to the precise boundaries of revenue assurance. Simply speaking, revenue assurance is mainly focused on boosting a telecommunications company's financial performance by minimizing (preferably wiping out) mistakes as financial information is processed, usually with the aid of business analytics. In some instances, this requires building a fraud management system. Usually, however, revenue assurance maximizes (1) revenue from retail and corporate sales; (2) the costs and revenues from wholesale and interconnects contracts; and (3) profitability and margins as they relate to any investment in information and network systems.
Revenue assurance behaves as a low-cost means to yield substantial financial returns for most telecom service providers, though these can be tough to predict and measure. This may bring about more than one skeptical executive. Although, when effectively executed, revenue assurance can be useful in other fields, there are three reasons it is most appropriate in the telecom sector:
- The complexity of determining the collective effect of systems and processes as they interact with one another.
- The incredibly high-volume and inversely low-volume of telecom transactions means that the financial implications of minor errors are magnified.
- Its quick rate of change, which facilitates strong competitiveness, and in so doing boosting the potential for errors.
As a final point, it is important to remember the fact that there aren't any particular guidelines or rules concerning revenue assurance, which also implies there is no governing body to help determine the best practices. Having said that, there are three particular disciplines of revenue assurance which should be utilized by a telecom provider to stimulate heightened profitability, including:
- Analyzing and minimizing revenue loss risk.
- Monitoring, Baselining, Auditing, Synchronizing, Investigating, and Compliance-also known as the CORE functions of revenue assurance.
-The Revenue Management Chain, which decomposes a company's revenue assurance scope.