A User-Centric Approach to Revenue Assurance

A couple years ago, Revenue Assurance was the hottest thing. Carriers understandably jumped on any opportunity to seemingly recover millions of dollars in unbilled revenue. The problem was the vendors selling Revenue Assurance solutions either did not realize or neglected to inform the carriers that, while their tools certainly facilitate the identification of Revenue Assurance issues, it’s really up to the carrier to resolve the issues. RA tools are great at identifying billing discrepancies, prioritizing them and recommending resolution workflow. What they don’t do is the necessary final research into their validity and system updates that fix the issues. Unless the carriers invest the time and resources to do this, their RA successes will be dubious. I posit that this is perhaps why RA hasn’t been the sure thing revenue builder it was once thought to be.

If the problem is that carriers don’t have the time and resources, what can be done to address this? What about an RA solution that is ad-hoc and user-driven rather than a back office audit of thousands of discrepancies? Instead of treating RA as effectively an ETL “bashing” of millions of rows of data from multiple systems at once, why not take the Business Intelligence approach of providing users with visibility into a consolidated picture of the underlying data sources, errors and all? That way, the identification and correction of discrepancies can be integrated into the core processes of the users who know the data best and rely on it to be accurate in the first place. You could even take this a step further and incorporate SOA so that the interfaces used to view this consolidated data can be leveraged by not only users but systems across the entire enterprise that need access to shared data and perhaps have the resources to fix the problem, one discrepancy at a time.