In the past we have heard a whole range of statistics for Revenue Assurance. the percentage of Revenue Leakage (are you familiar with the famous 1- 15% ?), the percentage of acceptable Revenue Leakage, etc.   

The problem with most published  information is that at the best of times it is based on conversations and experience and at the worst of times it is based on pure imagination, and wishful thinking. What it was never based on was a rigorous and unbiased study (don’t even try to convince me that a “20 minutes to complete” survey without exact metric definitions is rigorous benchmarking – sorry no links here - it quite simply is not).  Now for the first time a serious organization, the TeleManagement Forum (TMF), is taking a serious step toward a reliable benchmark in their  RA benchmarking survey  

I cannot claim impartiality regarding this survey, I am one of the many persons that worked on defining the Revenue Assurance Standard KPIs (RASK) proposed by the TMF which are at the core of this benchmarking; I think we did a good job setting 20 standard strategic KPIS that cover 3 important aspects, the leakages, the coverage of RA activities, and the efficiency of RA in the organization. 

I must admit that in the past I did not really believe that Service Providers (SPs) would be willing to participate in such a study; to my surprise many SPs were more than willing to participate. The question is, why? SPs need to understand their situation vs. the industry and need to report their management in a reliable and agreeable way (and it is really difficult to convince management of your numbers , if you are the one that decided how and what to measure) – so RA practitioners  embrace the concept of having standard KPIs and using them for benchmarking. The good news is that this study is open to all the TMF members.

Being the first RA benchmarking survey organized by the TMF, the TMF is willing to invite a limited number of non members to participate free of charge. Again I am biased, I am involved , and I am all in favor of this study, but I sincerely believe that it is an important opportunity for our industry- so I will end by preaching to all you SPs out there that by participating, you will both contribute to the industry, and benefit yourself. So go on,  BE A PART OF THIS RA BENCHMARKING STUDY!

My good friend Eric Priezkalns (who has an excellent blog on Revenue Assurance – even though at times I disagree with his opinions, I always find them interesting and challenging), sent me about a month ago a detailed email with a very interesting suggestion. I did not reply to his email, not because I wanted to be rude, but because Microsoft Outlook decided that it was spam and put it in the “junk e-mail” folder. What makes this more interesting is that I regularly receive emails from Eric (from the same address) – so there was no reason for me to suspect that one of his emails would be considered spam. Of course I went immediately to the “Junk email options” to see what was wrong – my level of junk protection was set to low and none of the white or black lists there gave any reason as to why this particular email was blocked. After a short investigation it seems that as a regular user I cannot see or modify the basic “spam detection” rules “built-in” to Outlook. Certainly I can revise my Junk email folder regularly, or disable the spam filtering, but this is not an acceptable solution (in Q4 2005 MAAWG estimated that 80-85% of incoming mail is “spam”). 

Now to a totally different story, quoting David Pogue’s blog of July 18 2007, in the New York Times 

Yes, my bill for the month was 492 pages (double sided, 9 point font) long!! The amount I owed (remember, I had the “all you can eat data plan”) was $8! The postage to send me the ream of paper was $9!! 

Besides the fact that the details of the bill were completely irrelevant (”fix price plan”), giving a 492 page bill is too much detail for any retail customer to digest, even if they are relevant. 

So there you have it, two stories, from two different worlds. In one the information is completely hidden, hence the user cannot understand or foresee the behavior. In the other there is too much information, which has the same effect on the user where everything is unclear. Certainly there is no “golden compromise” sometimes you need all the info, other times you do not. The solution in my view is giving the users the bottom line, plus capabilities to drill down and analyze, slice and dice information as needed, this is true for rule base systems, and for bills, and for many other systems. Until this becomes the standard way of presenting information, we will continue being rude to our friends and continue to pay for bills that we cannot verify.