Support Systems: Professional Services Address Revenue Assurance

For example, Portal Software Inc. recently rolled out revenue assurance business consulting services to help providers determine their exposure to revenue leakage, says Jennifer Kyriakakis, Portal’s services marketing group manager. The company made available the services to its customers last fall and expects to do “a more global rollout” this summer.

Recently, Kyriakakis says, there’s been a big push by service providers to tackle revenue assurance. She says this process should start from the time customer acquisition begins. Five percent to 10 percent of revenue leakage is caused by fallout during the customer acquisition process; for example, certain services the subscriber signs up for frequently aren’t correctly registered in the provisioning or the billing system.

As part of its revenue assurance professional services, Portal assesses leakage potential by looking at whether the service provider recently has migrated a new set of customers to a new system or alternate system (due to a merger or acquisition, for example). Portal also considers whether the service provider did a quick product launch to beat the competition to market. It also asks whether the carrier has added new business functionality; inquires whether there is a high percentage of revenue base on usage charges rather than recurring charges; and checks on the integration of processes between different units within the organization or partners with the organization, says Kyriakakis.

After determining the service providers’ likely exposure to revenue leakage, Portal helps to quantify it and defines where it’s happening. Then it works with the service provider to decide whether it’s a problem worth fixing. Kyriakakis says Portal helps service providers address the big, easily done issues first and then look at how to deal with longer-term revenue assurance issues to prevent leakage in the future.

Connexn Technologies, a cost and revenue assurance software outfit, also has a professional services arm. Professional services addressing revenue assurance are also part of EUR Systems’ portfolio.

The back-office group at EUR Systems will help service providers without the resources to do the job themselves to figure out why particular files are being rejected by the billing system, says Karen Mitchell, vice president of sales and marketing at the billing and revenue management company.“We take those reject files and try to find a common denominator,” she says. “Usually, they can fix one problem — like a new product — and it can fix a lot of problems. But we can also work [reject files] one by one if we have to and get them cleaned up. Service providers can pay us for this by the hour.”

Professional services are just part of the long list of billing and revenue management solutions EUR Systems provides, Mitchell says. “We do a little bit of everything — CABS, and end-user billing with Aptis,” she says. “We offer remittance processing. We offer billing and mail. We do bad debt management.We’re a one-stop shop.”

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