by J David Childs

Created on: May 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 20, 2009

Executive Summary

While Telcos struggle with the next generation broadband services and the investments required to serve the high-end access markets, attention is lacking to the low tech services offered in tariffs for testing, standby technicians, and the like. There is evidence that these access services, although billable, are seldom billed because processes were never developed to interface between service assurance/maintenance and billing processes. Additionally, if you were take a look at the access tariff rates, you might find that the rates do not cover the costs of dispatching field forces, additional testing or additional engineering.

At least two positive outcomes can be expected when assuring the processes are effectively capturing revenue due for the access services that the Telco renders. The obvious outcome is incremental revenue. Depending on the size of the Telco's operations, resulting revenue from process development may be in the millions of dollars. A less obvious benefit could be the reduction to customer-generated trouble reports. Many access customers are using the Telco test capabilities and workforce as their primary isolation source.

By developing the processes, manual, mechanical interfaces between disassociated mainframe environments, or BSS/OSS applications, the Telco may generate incremental revenue never before tapped. Within the first year, this new revenue could significantly help fund network investments and/or meet rising operational costs of customer (care) support centers and field forces. Over the long term (perhaps, but not guaranteed) the new processes will cause declining demand for such services that, though lawfully billable through support of the access tariffs, have seldom or never been invoiced.

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Determining if a gap exists

As the Telco's access product manager, you should make the time to review the demand for customer trouble reports of access services. Compare these trouble reports, and their cause and disposition codes that reflect customer trouble, trouble not found, and test ok, to the revenue associated with the billing elements of the maintenance or additional services described in the access tariffs. The customer care process should retain trouble ticket information for purposes of reporting and measuring. The billing system should have the billing element codes tabled with the tariff rates. You may find that these billing elements have been grouped

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