Efficiency & RA Corrections

TRI: Every telecom's revenue assurance department is resource constrained -- you'd love to explore every nook and cranny in the operation, but you only have so many people. So how do you keep yourself efficient?

Romano: Altogether in our RA function we have between 500 and 600 people. Roughly half of our staff are tasked with cleaning up errors. With the initiatives we're currently working on, we're hoping to automate a lot of that cleanup.

Certain billing operations, such as wholesale or third party settlements, are also handled by my group.

But in terms of better managing the resources we have, we think it's critical to avoid touching the data too many times.

One way we do that is to focus on aggregating errors at the post-provisioning and pre-billing point.

You don't want to send your analysts on a wild goose chase. If you know an order hasn't completed yet, there's no sense scrutinizing it quite yet. So by correlating problems at that critical post-provisioning / pre-billing point, you avoid having to look at things multiple times.

TRI: How much of your corrections are done manually?

Romano: Wherever we don't have a tool to change things in bulk, we have people in our group who I call "the hands". They make the changes. Some of the people in that group do semi-automated fixes.

We also have mass-credit processes that we can issue through the ordering or billing systems.

The vision is this: you get the data feeds from IT. You make a determination as to how you want to resolve the customer issue. Then you send that out through these mass-correction processes.