Wipro helped a leading telecom infrastructure company in UK increase billing accuracy by 18.75%, reduce resource spend by 16%, and plug revenue leakage to the tune of 1.3 million GBP by implementing the Continuous Improvement Framework for pre-billing validation.

Client Background

The client is one of the leading telecom infrastructures in UK. It installs and maintains the communication infrastructure that links homes and businesses to their service providers’ networks.

Industry Landscape

Industry experts estimate telecom companies face losses, ranging from 1% to 5% of the overall revenue, due to revenue leakage. Apart from dealing with the issue of revenue leakage, the telecom companies also need to ensure customer satisfaction by not overcharging them. Any dispute from the end customer would mean rework and can lead to hefty fines from the regulatory authority. A robust pre-billing validation process is necessary to keep the balance between revenue management and customer satisfaction.

Opportunity

The client had raised these concerns:

•  Billing accuracy was 80% against a target of 90%, leading to delayed revenue realization
•  Quality score was 95% against a target of 99%. Every wrong validation either meant lost revenue opportunity or a dispute from the customer’s end
•  Handling time targets were not met
•  Human resources were not aligned optimally, leading to unequal queues
•  Team members were not aware of the upstream and downstream processes, resulting in wrong validation

Solution

To overcome these challenges, the team members were introduced to the Continuous Improvement Framework. As a result, the team got out of the firefighting mode and adopted a standard approach to resolving issues.

The framework included:

Voice of Customer: Introduction to the concept of external customer and internal customer. Creation of Critical to Quality performance measures

Process Simplification: Concepts of Value Stream Mapping and L4 process mapping introduced to help identify the “wastes” in the process. Upstream and downstream processes explained to help understand the impact of wrong validation

People, Quality, Delivery and Cost: Current, future and target conditions outlined

Automation: Non-value-add processes automated using macros

Fungibility: A flexible pool of resources created to counter the spike in volumes. Skill matrix calendar prepared 

Business Impact

The Continuous Improvement Framework helped the client maintain the equilibrium between revenue management and customer satisfaction.

• Business Value Metric generated to the tune of 1.3 million GBP post closure of two projects which were led and identified by team members
• 18.75% increase in billing accuracy
• Consistently achieved billing accuracy of >95%
• Disputes reduced drastically by 90%
• Quality score of 99% achieved consistently
• 16% FTE reduction Increase in quality by 5.3%
• AHT reduction by 16%, leading to increase in capacity
• 100% cross-skilling achieved to meet demand across various queues
  

“Really good attention to detail and focus on Continuous Improvement has increased our productivity and has allowed our bills to be more accurate. Also, Wipro has found out areas where we were missing on revenue”

- Director of Payments and Head of Managed Services