BPM Analytics
Revenue leakage is a major pain point for most organizations. There are a lot of reasons for revenue leakage. In this podcast, Anand discusses the causes and solutions of revenue leakage in the context of a telecom client.
Alisha: Hello listeners, this is Alisha; thank you for tuning in to yet another exciting and informative podcast from us at Infosys BPM. Today, we are discussing about quelling revenue leakage and boosting profits. And to talk about this, we have here with us, Anand Chandrashaker, Sr. Domain Principal – BPM Analytics. Welcome Anand. How are you?
Anand: I’m doing great, Alisha. Thank you for having me again on this podcast.
Alisha: It’s a pleasure. Anand, the idea of revenue leakage is quite alarming for organizations. What could cause revenue leakage in a typical organization?
Anand: Yes, indeed. Revenue leakage is quite a dreaded word in any organization, Alisha. So, it’s in everyone’s best interests to identify and eliminate every cause of revenue leakage. For one of our telecom clients, for instance, the revenue leakage identified was to the tune of more than $2 million per year.
When we delve into revenue leakage, we can find several key reasons. Incorrect charging or billing is one of them. When the organization is charging its customers, it may not be pricing its services accurately. Sometimes, they may offer discounts over discounts.
Without proper analytics, an organization may provide the same discount offer multiple times to one customer. Sometimes, revenue leakage could be due to configuration errors, order management problems, and so on. For instance, in case of the above-mentioned client of ours, they were offering roaming services without margins due to inadvertent additional discounting.
So, revenue leakage is a major problem, and it could be due to several key issues like these.
Alisha: I understand; those were some very obscure patterns that people might overlook.
What in your opinion is the best way to curb or eliminate this?
Anand: We really need to analyze the revenue generation streams and business areas of every organization in order to identify the reasons for leakage and eliminate them. Our digital revenue assurance services can minimize or completely eliminate leakages through advanced analytics as well as through a rule-based engine.
As an example, for the telecom client, we initiated monitoring of daily usage, activations and deactivations and many such trends, and therefore, we could dive deep into leakage scenarios. We set up a digital revenue assurance operations team for the client, which could monitor and fine-tune existing controls and generate insightful dashboards. We were able to deliver the client all necessary insights on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis. With such 24x7 monitoring, we managed to improve detection coverage and mitigate risks in real time.
Alisha: That’s great to hear, Anand. With a proper revenue leakage detection solution, will organizations benefit greatly?
Anand: Yes, that’s correct, Alisha. In the case of the client I was referring to earlier, we managed to deliver a much stronger client experience and 100% leakage detection coverage. It was only a matter of time before the results showed themselves.
Since the client had direct access to all the revenue leakage dashboards we developed, they were able to take correct decisions on a near real-time basis. They managed to identify formerly unknown leakage reasons such as miscalculations in order management systems, normalization issues in usage records, rejected records, and other related discrepancies in their billing configurations. For example: “A customer reached out to an operator for a new connection. When getting onboarded, he got provisioned on a discounted enterprise plan instead of a retail plan which he actually asked for. Due to this manual error, he was offered various freebies and free minutes on international calling which he’s not supposed to get. In such cases, the revenue loss cannot be recovered and gets tagged as bad debt. Similarly, we are seeing various configuration related problems causing billing inconsistencies.
Essentially, we managed to seal up the hole that was leaking over $2 million in revenues for that company. Additionally, the operational efficiency improved by 30%, and we managed to provide 50% cost savings.
Alisha: Those were some fantastic results you managed to achieve. Anand, thank you so much for coming to our podcast and sharing your insights on revenue leakage prevention.
Anand: It was indeed a pleasure, Alisha.
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