Telecom fraud and revenue inconsistencies cost the communications industry up to $28.3 billion per year, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA). Revenue Assurance and Fraud systems are clearly overworked, and problems threaten to worsen as telecoms establish complex partnerships and venture into content distribution. Here, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize telecom fraud management and business assurance. AI will not only help predict fraudulent activity and decrease bad debt risks it can also improve the overall revenue by forecasting churn and leakage. Unsupervised learning facilitates better detection of the ‘unknowns’ and helps to enhance the customer experience and provide service assurance to improve overall Business Assurance scope in telecoms.
The Need for AI Intervention
Fraud is one of the major factors that lead to revenue leakage in the telecom industry today. Unlike conventional fraud detection and Revenue Assurance systems, you don’t have to train the AI systems with every scenario. Because Machine Learning models educate themselves with historic data and provide better resilience. Considering the elephantine volumes of data produced today, manual data reconciliation might not be an efficient process. Because manual data preparation is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. Coping up with today’s market climate is impossible without the intervention of AI. Machine learning can reduce the manual intervention and speed up data reconciliation against downstream billing data to provide Collection assurance. For all internal purposes and any conflicts with customers, revenue assurance departments receive a single source of evidence. With an AI-based approach, telcos will gain better revenue visibility, eliminate human bias, and avoid avoidable losses.
Benefits
Actionable Insights
AI enables quick actions through insights on margins, products, and customers. This way, it improves customer and employee experiences, cash flows, and partnerships. It also improves the average leakage identification by 0.5 – 5%.
Reduced Revenue Leakage Cycle
AI’s real-time processing reverses the industry’s normal 24-hour latency for detection of leakages and revenue leakage exposure time.
Analytics driven Business insights
AI offers business insights for CXOs across departments including Marketing, finance, sales, network, and more with specific departmental context. Specific insights with such clarity would enable them to enhance product performance, network-based margin, partner risk analytics, and more. It also facilitates Partner Incentives Assurance to offer automated audits.
Can AI Expedite Telecom Assurance with 5G?
Communications service providers’ (CSPs’) network opex has been rising since 2012 and the opex rise has brought about a substantial fall-off in the revenues. The decline is expected to worsen with the launch of 5G if current operational approaches are being followed. Incorporating Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) would be imperative not just for Business Assurance, but to even sustain in the market in the 5G era
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