When digital goes wrong (and why revenue assurance is the answer)
18 Jan 2017
When digital goes wrong (and why revenue assurance is the answer)
Going digital isn’t only about being able to offer cool new services – it’s about the customer experience and ensuring excellent, seamless customer journeys and interactions. But unfortunately, it doesn’t always go as planned…
Recently I applied for a credit card with very attractive rates and benefits. The process seemed easy and straightforward enough – I applied online, and immediately received a text message that ‘approval was pending’, together with a link enabling me to track the process. (So far, so good – this is how a digital experience is meant to be). But then, it all went horribly wrong –the authorization request was never sent, and I found myself back and forth on the phone with my bank, with the credit card company (or more accurately their IVR system) for months.
And when I finally received my card, I used it for the first time only to discover that I had been mistakenly assigned a 25-cent credit limit (!), which also took me a lot of effort to sort out. I felt very much like the man eternally waiting to enter in Kafka’s 1915 masterpiece Before the Law.
Clearly, this is not the consumer experience they were aiming for – unfriendly interfaces, inaccessible solutions, long waiting times, ineffective self-service, incorrectly provisioned services, the lack of sanity checks, and no accountable entity with whom the customer can communicate. So how do service providers safeguard digital services to avoid this kind of situation?
One approach may already be part of the service provider’s arsenal. Though it might not yet been widely recognized for such, revenue assurance offers a methodology that can ensure their smooth transformation to becoming a digital service provider.
Why? Well, with this kind of methodology, the credit card company I’d applied to would have been able to detect problems much earlier on: the delay in handling my request, the activation of the ridiculous credit limit, etc. They would have been able to identify what was causing the problems, and whether they were one-time issues or ongoing problems with the systems or processes. And they would have been able to take proactive measures to correct the problems and to reduce their impact on me.
Not only can revenue assurance methodology enable a more successful transformation to digital, but I believe it should become a permanent fixture of the digital ecosystem.
Before today, revenue assurance was chiefly used for systems, business processes and events. Operational teams struggling to create new products and services in record time are prone to errors and revenue assurance systems are there to reduce those errors, analyze risks, ensure controls that verify that everything is on track, quickly detect outliers, and initiate corrections.
The revenue assurance best practices and recommendations being created by TM Forum are exactly the kind of methodology that needs to be used by service providers to support digital.
Using revenue assurance for digital means turning its powerful focus and capabilities onto customers and customer journeys. It can even help with another important facet of digital – the rapid development and launch of multiple new services because a sound revenue assurance methodology can support the equally-rapid creation of multiple new controls to protect those services.
Communications service providers have learned the importance of revenue assurance over and over again. By leveraging TM Forum revenue assurance methodologies and tools in smart new ways, service providers can become digital service providers faster and more efficiently (and I hope that a certain credit card provider will be watching their example very closely!)
At Action Week Lisbon next month, two days will be devoted to revenue assurance. Find out more or contact cstock@tmforum.org for more information.
(This post was first published in blogs.amdocs.com)
Recently I applied for a credit card with very attractive rates and benefits. The process seemed easy and straightforward enough – I applied online, and immediately received a text message that ‘approval was pending’, together with a link enabling me to track the process. (So far, so good – this is how a digital experience is meant to be). But then, it all went horribly wrong –the authorization request was never sent, and I found myself back and forth on the phone with my bank, with the credit card company (or more accurately their IVR system) for months.
And when I finally received my card, I used it for the first time only to discover that I had been mistakenly assigned a 25-cent credit limit (!), which also took me a lot of effort to sort out. I felt very much like the man eternally waiting to enter in Kafka’s 1915 masterpiece Before the Law.
Clearly, this is not the consumer experience they were aiming for – unfriendly interfaces, inaccessible solutions, long waiting times, ineffective self-service, incorrectly provisioned services, the lack of sanity checks, and no accountable entity with whom the customer can communicate. So how do service providers safeguard digital services to avoid this kind of situation?
Revenue assurance's role
One approach may already be part of the service provider’s arsenal. Though it might not yet been widely recognized for such, revenue assurance offers a methodology that can ensure their smooth transformation to becoming a digital service provider.
Why? Well, with this kind of methodology, the credit card company I’d applied to would have been able to detect problems much earlier on: the delay in handling my request, the activation of the ridiculous credit limit, etc. They would have been able to identify what was causing the problems, and whether they were one-time issues or ongoing problems with the systems or processes. And they would have been able to take proactive measures to correct the problems and to reduce their impact on me.
Not only can revenue assurance methodology enable a more successful transformation to digital, but I believe it should become a permanent fixture of the digital ecosystem.
Before today, revenue assurance was chiefly used for systems, business processes and events. Operational teams struggling to create new products and services in record time are prone to errors and revenue assurance systems are there to reduce those errors, analyze risks, ensure controls that verify that everything is on track, quickly detect outliers, and initiate corrections.
The revenue assurance best practices and recommendations being created by TM Forum are exactly the kind of methodology that needs to be used by service providers to support digital.
Using revenue assurance for digital means turning its powerful focus and capabilities onto customers and customer journeys. It can even help with another important facet of digital – the rapid development and launch of multiple new services because a sound revenue assurance methodology can support the equally-rapid creation of multiple new controls to protect those services.
Communications service providers have learned the importance of revenue assurance over and over again. By leveraging TM Forum revenue assurance methodologies and tools in smart new ways, service providers can become digital service providers faster and more efficiently (and I hope that a certain credit card provider will be watching their example very closely!)
At Action Week Lisbon next month, two days will be devoted to revenue assurance. Find out more or contact cstock@tmforum.org for more information.
(This post was first published in blogs.amdocs.com)
