T h e Te l c o R e v e n u e A s s u r a n c e H a n d b o o k

LEAKAGE PREVENTION
Proactive revenue assurance, or leakage prevention, has only re-
cently come to be accepted as a legitimate concern of Revenue
Assurance. Whereas leakage management is concerned with stop-
ping leaks that are occurring right now, and risk management is
concerned with seeing where leaks have happened in the past, leak-
age prevention takes a forward-looking view of the problem.

Leakage Prevention – Challenges

The biggest problem with leakage prevention is that you are trying
to predict that something will go wrong before it actually does. Even
if you do that successfully, there is a good chance that people will
fail to recognize how valuable that preventive activity actual is.

Leakage prevention is the role of trying to get people to do things

the right way the first time in order to prevent future problems. Since
it is future problems you are trying to avert, it is very easy for people
to consider the advice being given as too conservative or not price
effective.

Some examples can help illustrate this problem.

New Product Development

A large percentage of the revenue assurance problems faced by many

telcos arise when the new product development group fails to ade-
quately plan for revenue generation as part of the product rollout. It
is not unheard of for telcos to release new products and deliver them
to the public long before they have even figured out how they will
bill for it. The problem with this approach should be obvious.

New Rate Plan Rollout

A much more common, though a less catastrophic problem, can

occur when new rate plans are developed and delivered to custom-
ers before the billing systems and customer service organizations
are equipped to handle them. The net result can be a rollout that
allows customers to enjoy services at no charge until the “bugs” are
worked out.

46