Software Alone Never Fixes the Issue

By Al Brisard

A wide variety of financial and operational forces resulting from the global economic downturn and slow recovery have cast many traditional carrier business practices in doubt. Costs, if not carefully monitored and contained, can spiral out of control. Forecasts of sales and expenses need to be carefully aligned with projected revenue. Operational underperformance, usually relating to billing and collection of revenue, can lead to revenue leakage along the entire customer lifecycle, from initial customer order through cash collected. Emerging technologies and competition in the market put enormous pressure on carriers to retain their customer base while increasing revenues. Often determining where the problems occur in a carrier business, and arriving at innovative solutions to remedy those problems means looking at the existing business from different perspectives, based on the comparison of data from seemingly unrelated areas of the business.

Knowing this needs to happen and making it happen are two different things. While tactical matters around revenue growth, customer acquisition and new product launches consume most of a carrier’s time, management is increasingly turning to software solutions as quick-hit approaches to solving their problems. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of business intelligence and revenue assurance software and the plethora of these solutions being marketed to the carrier market. Unfortunately, many of these software packages are being sold as problem solvers, not organizers of data and business rules. Companies hungering for a swift fix are purchasing these products without a clear understanding of the limitations the products inherently have.

Software in only a facilitator – a tool to organize, comb and manipulate data. If a group or individual needs to review data in the same way and in the same format every month, then the software can provide that. But the determination whether the data that the software delivers is good, bad, sufficient or insufficient must be made by individuals. The vendor’s software can be the greatest tool on the market, but it won’t run itself and it won’t provide the carrier with the domain expertise to understand, interpret and manipulate the data in a way that yields real intelligence. Software isn’t able to intuitively know that it needs to search for additional data in different parts of a database, or dig deeper into the summary data provided. Nor will the software be capable of uncovering new opportunities. 

Software is a tool to gather and organize information or to incorporate it as part of a process in place, and that’s really its primary use. Employees still need to properly analyze data, adjust business rules and make business decisions. What software does do is make the people using it more efficient. Software enables them to spend less time on repetitive, tiresome work and spend more time analyzing the value of the data, determining the issues faster and deciding upon the appropriate course(s) of action required, if any. Software tools are accelerators, not the decision makers.

Al Brisard is vice president of marketing and business development at Vertek Corp. , a leading provider of end-to-end business process outsourcing, business consulting and managed business assurance offerings that allow communication providers to reduce costs, improve customer experiences, grow revenue and ultimately improve profitability. Contact him at: abrisard@vertek.com.