Logging Tips

Fraud is a big issue and can cost a company £ KKK. We tend to associate fraud with hackers on the outside. Unfortunately, many of the cases uncovered by our customers have been internal. Some of these may be malicious, some may be innocent, some just plain devious. Whatever the cause, people will find a way around your security systems if there is one.

Here are some examples:

• BT information codes offer staff a method of getting around your call barring. For example, dialling 141 or 1470 in front of any number can often cheat the PBX into allowing international or premium calls that would normally be barred. Make sure your system can pick them out.
• If international access is allowed, using the country code (e.g. in UK 0044) in front of a national number, can throw the costing matrix on a call logger.
• Any manager will know the Extension range specified within their switch. So when we started logging a City Bank and accrued £2,000 worth of calls against an extension that 'did not exist', the manager was a bit surprised. LUMBERJACK will auto-learn extensions and so it high-lighted that a maintenance engineer had taken advantage of this 'free' telephone service.
• Another large corporate discovered a member of staff running a business from their desk. The staff member had published their DDI Extension as their business line.
• External hackers can be traced easily if you know the patterns of your telephone dialling. However, if regular checks are not made, the Finance Department may find out first.
• Sitting in his office late one evening, a Comms Manager became aware of several short calls travelling around the open plan office. On checking with his LUMBERJACK call logger, he discovered that the calls were being received in numerical sequence. He was being hacked!
• Make sure you have changed the 'standard' password on your switch. Default passwords are readily available to hackers.

Running a few simple reports each day could save a lot of worry and embarrassment. We often hear people say that they no longer look at the reports because they always look the same. Don't let that stop you checking—if they look the same, this is good! This is the knowledge that will help you spot any anomalies very quickly. We recommend the following practice:

• Run daily reports looking for unexpected out-of-hours calls. These should be checked each morning.
• Look for high durations calls or calls to unexpected destinations.
• Look for a series of incoming short duration calls as described in our example of hacking above.
• Look for outgoing calls with no cost, these may have found a way around your systems.
• Make sure you have an accurate copy of the agreed tariff installed on your call logger. In this way, you can check the telephone bills each month.

Mobile phone costs are rocketing. We can now be contacted at any time, anywhere around the globe. Call transfers are easy to set up and, whilst the cost of calling internationally via fixed line has plummeted, the cost of mobile communication is heading the other way.

It is, therefore, vital to ask about the ‘non-geographic’ calls. Ask for a breakdown of how these rates are charged, including ‘Free’ calls. Using LUMBERJACK reports, it is easy to see how much connection time your systems are giving these numbers.

Mobile Cost and Apportionment

Many mobile providers will offer reasonable rates via a ‘Gateway’ into their system. To find out if it is worthwhile, you will need to run logging reports to see the breakdown of calls to mobiles via the different carriers. If you have a broad spread across all carriers, it might be time to develop a corporate policy on mobiles. It may be cost effective to provide mobiles to staff using a specific carrier and set-up a Gateway.

How many staff make use of the call forward facility in order to divert calls to their mobiles?

How much is this costing your company?

Impossible to know unless you run a call-logging report to see how many calls come into your site and transit through to a mobile. Bear in mind also, that many of these calls may have originated internally (extension to extension), so don’t just look at ‘outgoing’ expenditure.

Be aware that not all loggers show calls that have gone to a third party, e.g. extension to extension to trunk. If this is the case, external diverts may not be costed. The best way to find out is to make some test calls to find out how your logger monitors these: Try diverting your extension to your mobile, then call your diverted extension from another extension. You should be sent through to your mobile straight away. Now run a logging report on these two extensions and see what the results are. To give you an idea, our LUMBERJACK system would show this as a three party call: extension to extension to trunk showing the dialled digits for your mobile number, this call would also carry a cost.

If you are one of those companies who provide the mobile services to staff, you will be presented with a monthly bill. Someone is then tasked with the laborious job of allocating each of these phones to the various departments in order to apportion the cost. Many do not bother and simply divide it amongst the various departments.

To make this job easier, the LUMBERJACK call-logger will log the mobile telephone bill alongside the telephone usage. In this way you are able to incorporate the cost of mobile usage with the extension usage and provide departments with all the information in one billing report.

You will also be able to analyse the dialling patterns of these mobiles. For example, find out how many are using international roaming and at what cost. In some cases this may be efficient use of the facility, in others, it could be an extravagance.

History Lesson

Let us learn from history. In the 1980’s the fax became the essential office accessory, every department needed to have their own, then another, and so on. Telephone costs rocketed as each machine needed its own direct exchange line. People were using the PSTN to send a fax to another department a few floors away. Fortunately, DDI offered the solution. The DELs were cancelled and fax activity could now be monitored using the call logger.

What lesson can we learn from this? Look at the dialling patterns. For example, if people are simply making themselves available whilst in the building but away from their desk – think DECT.

How to see Hidden Costs

The strange thing about these ‘hidden costs’ is that they are not hidden at all. It will be patently clear to anyone paying the bills that mobile costs are rising. Like E-mail and web access, it is a part of everyday life to have a mobile. That is not going to change.

There is an interesting veil covering the whole issue bought about by the lack of communication between the ICT and Financial departments. If they started to talk to each other, and applied their management tools correctly, the potential cost savings are enormous.

The general method of reducing costs, is to take a copy of a bill and send it to a provider, who then calculates how much of a saving they could make based on these figures. This means that you are starting from a disadvantage, as you have given away vital information right at the start – the amount you are currently paying. All a provider has to do is better this figure to impress you.

Much better to be able to hand over a set of reports showing your dialled destinations with only the number of minutes connection time. Call-loggers will give you the top twenty dialled numbers, but this is not much help when dealing with providers. If all your most frequently dialled numbers are, say, in London, this will not give the provider much to work with.

Our LUMBERJACK call logging system will produce reports showing the countries and areas dialled, along with the duration (avg / max / total talk time). You can run this report with and without cost, then give the uncosted copy to the provider, keeping the costed copy for comparison once the offer has been made. In this way, you will have the bargaining power.

Most people think about international costs when negotiating with providers, but these days, there are other considerations. What is the cost of calls to ‘07’ numbers (personal and mobile numbering), ‘08’ numbers (Free to Nationally rated), and ‘09’ numbers (premium rated services)?

Many companies bar calls to numbers in the ‘09’ level and believe that they are safe from premium calls. This is not the case. There are many companies, particularly mobile carriers, who set up service lines within their own numbering range and charge high rates for them.

‘07’ covers mobile calls. It also covers personal roaming numbers (‘070’), some of which take a high fee per call.

‘08’ is widely thought of as ‘Free’. Not so, only numbers beginning ‘080’ are designated ‘Free’. ‘084’ is Local rate (or up to 0.05p per min.) and ‘087’ is National rate (or up to 0.10p per min.).

‘09’ is for premium rated services. This means they will cost more than an ‘08’ level call. 0900/1 calls should be capped at £5.00 per call. ‘0907/8’ have no capping. ‘0909’ is designated as ‘sexual entertainment’.

When negotiating with a provider, they are very good a giving you a breakdown of the Local, National and International rates, in addition they will give you a rate for the big four mobiles: Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 02. Incidentally, some providers will give you a low rate per minute but then impose a call set-up fee thus negating any savings.

• A company bought a system for a particular feature, only to be told that the feature is an optional extra and he needed to buy an additional module.
• A company purchased a system capable of logging multiple sites, only to find that this meant installing a stand alone system at each site.
• A company upgraded to the latest software, only to find they had lost functionality.
• A company bought a multi-user system, only to find that each user had to dial in to the server via pcANYWHERE instead of having integrated Web browser or client/server operation.

Donna Pickrell, Sarah Glavin and Andrew Miller met in 1993 whilst working in the call logging environment. At that time the call logging systems available were extremely basic and most of them still DOS based. But the Windows® revolution had taken hold and become the standard in most office environments. Customers wanted Windows based telephone call logging systems. The best most suppliers could provide was a Windows front end on an old DOS or Unix box. There was a very evident hole in the market.

More than that, however, was the realisation that the box shifting mentality was dead. Managers wanted service along with the systems they were buying. What they wanted was a call logger utilising the latest technology and, most importantly, backed up by top class customer service and support.

Hardly rocket science but considerably more than a spreadsheet package!

By May 1996, Sarah and Donna found themselves in a position to set up a company offering bureau services and analysis to customers. This was encouraged by a number of experts in the field. They spent much of their time designing the ultimate call logger, taking into account the wish lists they had heard over the years from their extensive experience in the market. Andy later joined them to head the technical development of the company and Focom Ltd took off.

Software does not stand still. Since the original LUMBERJACK system was beta tested, it has moved with the times and demands of the new Comms Manager. Additional reports , new modules and, of course, the Web interface, so necessary in business today. LUMBERJACK has been joined by a sister package, CATALOG. This is our directory and information database. For busy managers , we also offer our bureau service RETREEVER.

The R&D team know that work will never be completed as new innovations are always just around the corner. We keep up to date and, just as we did in the beginning, we try to anticipate our customers requirements and give them the right tool for the job.