How can operators make an impact on the African market?
 |
| Joao Manuel Faisca, Vice-President for Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, WeDo Technologies |
By Joao
Manuel Faisca, Vice-President for Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa, WeDo
Technologies
The past five years has been a time of
great investment and growth in telecommunications across Africa. Africa is still the fastest growing telecoms
market in the world and mobile penetration levels in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated
to reach 54% by the end of 2012 and 64% by 2015, compared to just 28% five
years ago.
However, due to this accelerated
growth, the African telecommunications industry has become much more
challenging. There is greater
competition among operators as well as the need to fast-track infrastructure
investment to grow capacity and offer new services. However, with these new services and growth
there is also great potential for leakages and fraud. In a report by Juniper
Research, it was found that operators were "leaking" revenue because
the complexity of networks made fraud and errors harder to spot. It was confirmed that the problem is worst in
Africa and the Middle East, where 15% of revenue is lost annually, compared
with 1% in Europe and about 2.8% in North America.
Similarly, one of the main challenges
in the African market for operators is ensuring that they are profitable even
with low average revenue per user (ARPU) – something that is common across the continent. Despite a low ARPU, there is still a huge
demand for operators to provide an exceptional customer services and implement
coherent and large scale network to offer new services.
But what does all this mean for the
operators in this region? How can they
overcome these challenges and provide customers with a great service and remain
profitable in this growing market?
Improving the P&L and ensuring
that customers remain happy and are provided with the services they require is
an essential focus for telecom operators. That makes identifying revenue
leakage, a vital part of an operator’s business. Similarly, operators need to ensure that they
are continuing to optimise efficiency and therefore are bringing money to the
bottom line. In order to do so,
operators should be aware of the concept of Business Assurance and use systems
to improve operational effectiveness and manage risk. It
tries to quantify what really matters to organizations and their stakeholders,
to show how they can improve their systems, and businesses, which ultimately
leads to overall business performance improvement.
Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management
are examples of two different processes that operators will want to monitor to
understand their business’ overall performance and overcome the challenges in
the African region. Identifying a structured and relational approach between
them and other areas ensures that your organization fully understands the
interdependence between processes, systems, and data that impact performance.
While Revenue Assurance and Fraud Management generate their own metrics,
Business Assurance will correlate the metrics between the two areas to
understand their impact on the business overall and how they relate to areas
such as collections or billing.
In order to tackle these potential
leakages and fraud losses, the operators should have or create a Revenue
Assurance & Fraud department with specific tools such as, a Business
Assurance system. Another option, is adopting a managed service approach. This offers an alternative to operators’
in-house operational planning, implementation, staffing, training, and on-going
operations. Via managed services,
telecom operators can reduce the guesswork and expense of business management
technology by obtaining software, services and support through a single point
of contact at an affordable monthly cost and most importantly the telecom
operators can virtually expand their teams via external expertise that have
access to global Business Assurance best practices.
In Egypt, for example, there is a
particularly high level of competition.
There are three operators covering the entire market with 100 per cent
penetration. In order to differentiate
itself from the competition and overcome the challenges within the African
market, one of the key operators in Egypt has deployed WeDo Technologies’ Business
Assurance system and comments, “The return on investment is very positive. I
can remember that in the first phase when we just applied the system, we had a
return on investment during the data acceptance test so it was very beneficial
for us.”
In order for operators in the African region to overcome these challenges they are facing and ensure that this period of growth does not turn sour, understanding the performance of their business is a critical aspect for improvement. In turn, this will assist them in improving their bottom line and ensure that their customers are happy – a win, win situation for all!
WeDo Technologies is an innovator in
revenue and business assurance software with customers in eight countries in
Middle East and Africa. WeDo
Technologies will be exhibiting at AfricaCom 2012. Visit them at stand P39 or contact Joao
Manuel Faisca (joao.faisca@wedotechnologies) or Pedro
Teixeira (pedro.teixeira@wedotechnologies.com) to arrange a meeting.
