Group Revenue Assurance

Cutting out over and under-billing…

This customer has an especially strong obligation to bill and report accurately. Over-billing was resulting in frustrated customers and increasing reputational damage. Additional overheads were incurred remediating the escalated issues, and then yet more service overheads were incurred issuing refunds. Overshadowing all of that was the risk of regulatory fines.

Meanwhile, revenue leakage from under-billing – after customers had made upgrades to their service packages – wasn’t able to be recouped, meaning real financial losses. Worse still, those costs were being exacerbated because it was taking months and months (nine months to a year in some instances) for such cases to be identified. And many were then unrecoverable anyway due to the latency in discovering them.

Finally, those same delays in exposing the problems made fraud detection almost impossible too.

Too many hands for – actually – quite light work…

Three employees were working, full time, in managing the updates to the organisation’s billing systems. They had to manually work through hundreds – sometimes thousands – of lines in a spreadsheet every month.

In each case they had to assign individual tasks to the most appropriate people across the business. Those tickets weren’t always followed up as rigorously as they ought to have been. Also, mistakes in task allocation were difficult to identify or rectify.

It just wasn’t practical to increase the size of the team and spread the workload. This was further hampered by a shortage of skills in South Africa, making recruitment of appropriately skilled and experienced operatives more costly and difficult. The result was simply that the service provider’s billing systems weren’t being updated quickly enough. Oversights, errors and omissions were being carried over and causing a cascading impact.

Similarly, the organisation would receive specific customer complaints but, due to the pressures on the team and the intensive manual processing, those complaints weren’t being acted on quickly enough.

The only way to deal with the problem satisfactorily was to automate and orchestrate the processes.

Automating the spreadsheet…

The first step was to automate as many of the spreadsheet tasks as possible, reducing the current team’s human effort to a minimum.

Creating the audit trail…

CORTEX has been configured so it can raise trouble tickets for all the service actions and send them to the appropriate systems and teams. It then also tracks those tickets to ensure they have been acted on, and either provides confirmation of completion, or raises an exception. Such exceptions are then escalated back to the original, three-strong team for further action. Frequently occurring exceptions can then, in turn, also be automated.

Deployment – and overcoming internal hurdles…

The first implementation took just five months to get up and running. CORTEX led the organisation through its standard ‘design sprint’ process (where feasibility, viability and practicality are scoped) and developed its Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

In real terms, this was a 50-day project. However, due to the organisation’s spreadsheet only being produced once a month, it took five months to do three iterations of effective design, development and testing.

Early successes in the pilot created an unnervingly high – yet quite correct – number of tickets. The internal teams found that overwhelming at first. Yet, they quickly understood and became able to respond appropriately by building iterative automations that prevented future reoccurrences.

Ticket volumes then dropped significantly as the automation took over, leaving the three-strong team better able to focus on making further improvements.

Moving forward with new innovations…

The organisation has now moved past the most disruptive phase of its billing process change – the initial stage – and the system is working well. Instead of billing anomalies being carried over – with repeated errors – all changes are implemented within a month. Now, rather than working from a batch-mode, monthly spreadsheet, they’re moving towards real time, immediate action.

Scaling up with little or no incremental costs…

The parent company of this organisation, a global service provider, is now looking to establish this capability as a strategic solution for its Group Revenue Assurance (GRA) and fraud prevention. Those operations are approximately eight times as big, so this would be a major undertaking.

While that’s is an exciting prospect, it’s only possible because CORTEX is so very highly re-usable and process-centric – not technology-centric. That means the wider group can effectively adopt this technology with little or no incremental cost. Given the scalability of both CORTEX and its pricing model, that means they can automate at scale, quickly, and cost effectively.

The future, and challenges specific to South Africa…

CORTEX is also being considered for two other major, yet very different use cases. The first is managing network equipment through load-shedding incidents, due to the frequent power outages in South Africa. CORTEX’s software can be configured to correctly identify actual equipment outages among the flood of default error messages that are seen during power cuts.

CORTEX might also be implemented for orchestrating the provision of third-party service elements in the CSP’s customer orders. The organisation resells external services, often as essential parts of its overall solutions. CORTEX’s software can be configured to automatically send order requests via e-mail, alerting specific individuals to follow up, and to interact with other systems via API.

---

* Assumed exchange rate of US$1 = ZAR18.5 (South African Rand)