Preventative Revenue Assurance

TRI: When we published our first research report on the Revenue Assurance software business six years ago, everybody was talking about stopping "revenue leaks." Are leaks still the issue they were back then?

Romano: I think the industry has matured quite a bit in six years. A lot of what we do at Verizon today is centered around preventative revenue assurance.

For example, in the past, promotions that appear on the bill would be tested and go out the door. Then when those promotions reach customers, we'd get phone calls from customers having problems. Customers calling in to complain was our way to detect issues in our ordering process.

Now my team is measuring 100% of every customer who places an order that has a promotion on it. We're measuring that order against business rules through the entire fulfillment to billing process. If we can get to it before the bill goes out the door, the customer never knew we had a problem.

Now a simple change in one element of a package is usually not an issue. Where the troubles often occur is where there are multiple changes to a package because it's hard to test all those scenarios.

So we're picking up those issues much farther upstream. And that's our objective: to stop a customer from ever being impacted by a glitch in our processes.