A well-practised discipline within the telecommunications industry, revenue assurance is rapidly evolving and extending its scope from simply assuring revenues to assuring business models, such as business assurance. In discussing revenue/business assurance, leading industry experts define business assurance as embracing not only revenue leakage but other aspects and areas of the overall business. TM Forum builds on the description by adding that business assurance integrates assurance and risk management disciplines into a data-centric, pro-active assurance framework with the goal to continuously protect and improve financial integrity, enhance business value, and improve the customer experience.
With the advent of 5G, customers are clamoring for increasingly sophisticated products and services. Regardless of the product or service, there are numerous business support systems (BSS) and operational support systems (OSS) processes that are interrelated, if not completely incorporated into the network. Inevitably, due to the complexities of these integrations, finding the root cause of a revenue issue has and continues to become increasingly problematic. Add to that the growing intricacies of the network, and the challenges facing today’s communications service providers (CSPs) are becoming significantly compounded.
When we take into consideration today’s increasingly complex networks, new network solutions, digitalisation, the interrelationships of BSS and OSS to deliver innovative and complex services, as well as the need to protect margins; CSPs are feeling the pressure to shift beyond revenue-only assurance to business assurance.
Business assurance shifts the spotlight to data
Given the importance of data within the telecommunications landscape, successful CSPs are increasingly becoming data-driven businesses. The most fundamental area where business assurance transformation plays an immediate role is in connecting siloed data sources into integrated, dynamic data sources that can be leveraged across all business units within the organisation, as well as support new initiatives and innovations.
Central to business assurance is achieving more than just revenue assurance, business assurance enables CSPs to liberate data and insights for a consistent flow of data across all telecom domains. In moving from a revenue assurance to a business assurance perspective, using data as an asset provides additional benefits beyond creating integrated data sources, including:
- Improve enterprise resource planning (ERP) strategies: By using the “new” data, CSPs can make their revenue accounting processes significantly more efficient and streamlined. Business assurance is how CSPs can use the data across fraud management, margin assurance, and financial integrity for a more comprehensible approach to data metrics identification.
- Streamline the customer experience: Delivering exceptional customer experiences offers a competitive advantage and provides CSPs with a revenue-generating differentiator. Given the enterprise-wide reach of business assurance, the now liberated data helps CSPs connect business information to deliver seamless and outcome-driven customer experiences and services.
- Serve as a secondary line of security: The digital transformation journey required of business assurance provides end-to-end monitoring that serves as a secondary line of security for this intricate digital environment. It provides additional controls that deliver an increased level of priority on privacy, security, and regulatory enforcement.
- Realise efficiencies and innovations: By using data insights across telecom domains, CSPs can be at the forefront of incorporating emerging technologies in their roadmaps to deliver innovative assurance solutions. By transforming from revenue assurance to business assurance CSPs can enhance and improve functions carried out across diverse domains, while providing the profitable and innovative services customers’ demand.
It's never been more important for CSPs to adopt a data-first approach, however performing the requisite data tasks are often complex and requires experts from multiple domains to work in unison. Business assurance enables digital maturity through data network integrations, allowing information to be available across business domains – enabling digital transformation efficiency and product and service innovation.
The intersection between business assurance and market growth
As a result of cloud transformation, the market is clamoring for new network solutions, and with CSPs realising the need to raise the bar on margin protection, business assurance is gaining traction and extending its reach to multi-disciplinary sectors. Add to that the increase, across all business sectors, of digitalisation, and assurance systems are fast becoming a requisite to observe and mitigate the inherent risks of running a telecom business, as well as provide the foundation for market growth. Transforming from revenue assurance to business assurance gives CSPs the ability to increase market growth by:
- Enabling trust and CX
- Enabling trusted environment for new multi-party business models.
- Improve the experience during customer journey phases cross partner’s omnichannel
- Managing the increased risk factors across all lines of business.
- Providing robust integration of real-time controls.
- Enabling risk assessment of business process controls within business operations.
- Broadening the scope of billing and revenue management for today’s complex, multi-service product offerings.
More inclusive than revenue assurance, business assurance acts as a comprehensive, proactive data-centric assurance system that continuously protects and improves financial integrity, while enhancing business value, providing a competitive edge, and improving the customer experience. For CSPs making the transition from revenue assurance to business assurance, focused attention needs to be on unleashing the data to develop and deliver innovative products and services, increasing market growth and business value, protecting financial integrity, and enhancing the customer experience.
