Black Swan Guide: Araxxe’s Revenue Assurance Consulting, Testing, and High Definition Billing Analysis Service

Dear Colleague:

Whatever happened to the consulting firms in Revenue Assurance?  Ten to 15 years ago PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and other independent firms did a good business in auditing telco billing processes to identity leaks and streamline operations.

What drove many RA consultants out of the market were two factors:

• Revenue Assurance became an established telecom role.  PwC was right: greater attention needed to be paid to back office accounting errors.  And telecoms around the world responded by funding RA staff and systems; and
  
• Auditing shifted to Continuous Monitoring.  With the arrival of switch-to-bill analytics systems from Subex, WeDo and others, operators had a useful RA tool.  The RA system was perfect for crunching big data and validating mediation, provisioning, subscriber, and billing records to spot errors before the invoices were sent.
  

In short, since RA departments had staff and systems adequate to handle most RA issues, the demand for outside auditors declined.

Why RA Consulting & Testing Services are Still Essential

Despite the trend, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss RA Consulting and Services.  A key reason is that a Switch-to-Bill RA platform is NOT the best tool for every RA task.

In fact, the RA pendulum may have swung too far in the “do-it-all-in-house” direction.  In the future, we’re likely to see a rise in demand for RA managed services, especially in areas such as telecom service testing and deep dive analysis of complex billing for data services.

Why do I say this?  Well, look at the highly creative services that telecom product managers have been pushing the past few years.  In the mobile market, consider the bundled bills, family plans, Roam-like-at-Home, zero-rated services, and video-on-demand.

The greater rating and external-data-reliance of such services brings on much greater RA risks.  And our industry is on the verge of 5G and IoT, services that will bring on an entirely new set of complexity and risks.

Even today, services such as roaming voice and data plans have an external billing data component that a switch-to-bill system cannot check (because it never receives the crucial underlying data).  That’s why global testing robots are absolutely essential for capturing the missing data to verify the accuracy of voice roaming partner TAP and data partner usage files.

On the other hand, buying and managing a fleet of testing robots and thousands of global telephone accounts is an expensive way to go.  And this is why hiring a billing verification testing and consulting firm makes sense.  The outside firm maintains its own global robots and testing networks, but shares their infrastructure with telcos who hire them to run the testing campaigns and report the results.

When you add it all up, I believe the best RA strategy is to blend the use of the internal Switch-to-Bill platform with the regular use of global robot testing and RA consulting expertise that RA managed service firms provide.

A Guide to RA Consulting & Managed Services

OK, so how exactly does an RA Consulting and Managed Services deliver value?  Getting answers to that question is the purpose of this Solution Guide.

Click the image at right to download the Black Swan Solution Guide: Expanding the Scope of Revenue Assurance Beyond Switch-to-Bill's Vision featuring a detailed 20-page discussion of Araxxe's managed services.

Araxxe is a firm who’s been delivering RA managed services since 2005.  In fact, Araxxe pioneered the delivery of telecom billing verification and RA testing as a managed service.

In this paper you’ll hear from Marc Pelous, Product Manager at Araxxe.  Marc has broad experience in telecom, having first worked in telecom network and market strategy before coming to Araxxe 12 years ago.  He’s also one of Araxxe’s top experts and has wide RA experience working with several global clients.

Here’s what you’ll learn in the paper:

• How the Araxxe’s end-to-end revenue assurance complements switch-to-bill RA processing by expanding the scope of investigations to telescope RA (external and partner data) and microscope RA (high-definition analysis of complex services like bundling and digital services).
  
• Get details on the RA problems in Digital Services, Bundling, Roaming Voice, and Roaming Data.  Also included is a detailed chart showing 5 billing errors discovered through Araxxe’s broader scope investigations.
  
• Advice on hiring an RA managed service provider and how Araxxe handles a variety of issues.  The Guide explains why telecoms large and small choose across more than 200 clients to outsource their RA testing and deep analysis to Araxxe rather than manage their own testing program.
  

Working with Araxxe on this paper gave me a deeper appreciation of the many nuances of RA errors.  For that reason alone, this Guide can be profitable reading for you.

Dan Baker, Research Director of TRI
Editor, Black Swan Telecom Journal