FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
30 June 2009
Contact: Dan Baker
Research Director
+1 570-620-2320
dbaker@technology-research.com
Verizon Takes a Preventative, Customer-Centric Approach to Revenue Assurance
An Interview with Kathy Romano, Executive Director of Revenue Assurance & Billing at Verizon
EFFORT, PENNSYLVANIA (30 June 2009) – Revenue assurance is a business function that's grown in importance at telecoms in the past several years.
An auditing function, revenue assurance basically ensures that intricate telecom ordering, provisioning, and billing processes are as accurate as possible.
As the breadth, complexity, and bundling of telecom products has increased, it's driven a need to closely monitor back office processes to keep customers satisfied and avoid surprises on the bill.
Now, according to Technology Research Institute (TRI), an analyst firm that's been tracking the revenue assurance software market since 2003, the function is nicely maturing thanks to innovative practices at carriers such as Verizon.
TRI's interview with the head of Revenue Assurance Operations at Verizon Retail affords an extraordinary inside view of what an advanced revenue assurance program looks like. The interview, posted free on TRI's website is with Kathy Romano, a 30-year telecom veteran, who runs the revenue assurance and billing quality program for Verizon's retail organization which serves all small business and consumer customers.
"Six years ago the industry was pre-occupied with plugging revenue leaks and fixing issues that had already caused customers some pain," says Dan Baker, Research Director of TRI. "Verizon's customer- rather than product-centric approach to RA and focus on preventing problems before the bills are sent out to customers is a great step forward," he adds.
Here are highlights from the interview:
On the need for Executive Dashboards in Revenue Assurance. . .
KR: "Actually I have no dashboards. To me, it's far more important to get the data right. Getting good data, accurate output, and the right set of metrics -- those are the most important things. A pretty dashboard is the last thing on my mind."
On moving to Customer-Centric Assurance. . .
KR: "Going forward, we're eager to continue our path out of the product-centric mindset. But that's tough to do because order flows are unique to products -- each product has its own work order processes because they get provisioned differently. Yet we think the secret to good RA practices is to aggregate at the customer level first, then aggregate up."
On the difficulty of catching errors in a Complex Business. . .
KR: "The rate of change in our business is so intense that it's hard to be perfect but that’s the goal. Every time you put in new code, you perform extensive testing and errors appear that you didn't anticipate. As IT sits down to code, a lot of times the product manager will write down requirements that do not cover the complete scope of the many support systems. That's why with an extra set of business eyes looking at the plan, you catch things and cover situations not originally conceived in product design."
On the need for fresh, unfiltered data. . .
KR: "I want the real, un-filtered data. I don't want data that's been modified in any way. If someone has purified a record in some way, some of the things being filtered out are exactly what I'm looking for. When you've got detailed data, it tells a story by itself. When you start playing with the data, you start to understand what's going on."
The complete interview with Kathy Romano is located on the TRI website.
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About Technology Research Institute
Founded in 1994, Technology Research Institute (TRI) is a market research and consulting firm that specializes in the areas of OSS/BSS software and telecom IT services. For further information, visit www.technology-research.com or Tel: +1 570-620-2320.