Case Studies

• Charter Agreements: District Councils and other Government bodies often have a Charter Agreement regarding their public relations. Part of this agreement is to guarantee to answer the telephone to incoming callers within a specified time period. With LUMBERJACK reports, this is easy to monitor. We can set up an answer delay column to show whether the target has been met and where is has failed.


• Engaged Tones: An ICT company based in High Wycombe, worked in the very competitive resellers market and were constantly finding that customers, potential customers and even staff complained about engaged tones. Once LUMBERJACK was installed we were able to show them the suite of traffic reports which allowed them, at a click of a button, to calculate blocking probability and grade of service presented. They soon discovered that their trunk set-up on the switch was not helping their business. Thanks to LUMBERJACK, they no longer have this problem.


• Call Centres: A large 27 site customer had a huge call centre and they found their call centre software produced summary style reports which did not allow them to identify how the statistics were generated. They wanted to see the route a call took before being answered by the team of Agents, how many Agents was the call presented to before being answered and, obviously, answer delays between the Agents. LUMBERJACK is now logging their Call Centre software so that they can see the full route of the call; the Agents ID; the actual extension involved in the call; and where the call came from. LUMBERJACK also logs their other 26 sites producing departmental structure reports, performance reports on their operators, and helps to combat fraud. It may not make the tea - but it will give you enough time to do that!

Paying the bills is often considered to be the responsibility of the Financial Departments, not the ICT managers. But it is the ICT manager who has the technology and the know-how that will provide the Financial Dept with the ability to reduce costs.

For notes on choosing a provider, see our article of the Hidden Cost of Mobile Phones

Our customers use LUMBERJACK telephone call logging software to check their telephone bills. Here are some of their experiences:

• A well known American Bank in the City was running reports to compare against their telephone bill. In one quarter, LUMBERJACK showed up an imbalance of £60,000. After investigation, the tariff company admitted that the negotiated discount rates had been incorrectly implemented.


• Another City Bank decided to check their telephone bills and discovered that the logging reports showed on average £2,500 less than the bills. In their case, the information about negotiated tariff rates had not been passed to the tariff billing department.


• A large cargo company had several self managed sites around the UK. Each had negotiated their own tariff according to their local use. Since LUMBERJACK is able to run reports across all of the PBXs, it was an easy matter to produce the information that negotiated a better rate for the whole company.

There are many different views on telephone expenditure. Some companies will pay the bill and see it as all part of the service. This is a very scary approach. Just re-read the examples we have given above! None of these discrepancies would have been discovered without call logging.

Other companies choose to apportion calls to each department and set them against a Cost Centre system, this puts Managers in charge of telephone expenditure. To do this they will need further information. A bill can only ever show you calls carried by a single provider, most companies use two or three carriers. All this information needs to be collated to give the full picture. It is also rare for a bill to provide incoming information although, where they supply the DDI service, this information is available from some providers. The net result, however, is that if you want your Managers to be accountable for their Departmental telephone expenditure they will need more information than can be provided by the telephone bill. This is what call logging will provide.

In addition to giving you a breakdown of departmental telephone usage, LUMBERJACK telephone call logging software allows you to incorporate each department's mobile telephone usage. This gives the true picture of telephone costs. Interested?

Give us a call on 01442 20 00 00 or send us an email

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 customer with sites around the globe wanted to find out how often the sites called each other - on one report. We could do it, but it took a lot of setting up. So we designed a new report that shows how often sites ring other sites; departments ring other departments; and extensions ring other extensions within the same Department. Great for organising the office floor plan, and monitoring private wires.


• Talking of private wires, a city dealing room wanted to cover the cost of Private Wires by billing the appropriate users. Their old call logger could cost each call but this didn't cover the cost of the lines. So we designed a report to show the distribution of calls and the percentage allocation. Problem solved.


• We were frequently being asked for a breakdown of mobile calls by carrier. So we came up with a report that can group all kinds of information together, including a breakdown of mobile carriers.


• Many people think that a Frequently Dialled Number report can help with tariff negotiation, but using our grouping report, we can provide a list of the number of calls to each country.



At Focom Ltd, we listen to our customers

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.