Dimension Data has launched its iBOSS Guardian Corporate Network Protection (CNP), aimed at reducing corporate telephone misuse, abuse and fraud, which can cost a company up to 20% of its monthly bill.
"Very few organisations can describe the overt amount of abuse or misuse that takes place on their telephones, as very few have a real grip on what is happening in their corporate telecoms environment," says Robert Picton, revenue assurance product manager at DiData.
He was speaking at a First Tuesday Business Powerlab event, held at the Forum this morning.
"Many companies don`t even have acceptable usage policies in place, simply because they have no way to enforce these, and while normal phone usage includes a certain amount of personal calls, one has to find a balance - you can`t be too draconian, but neither can you be too free."
He points out that there is misuse, abuse and fraud, each of which has its own effect on the system.
"Misuse occurs as a result of the inconsiderate or irresponsible use of a company`s telephone system, leading to inappropriate ratios of business to personal calling, whereas abuse involves the deliberate transfer of call costs to the company, is more severe and causes a direct loss to the company.
"This includes the abuse of call back and call forward functionality, conference call abuse and the abuse of special services numbers. Call selling fraud, on the other hand, is a practice that involves using another party`s telephone service to sell discounted calls for personal gain."
Picton says the Guardian system is not a replacement for a telephone management system (TMS), but rather is a product that works in conjunction with this to detect long-term patterns.
"The Guardian system builds a fingerprint that is unique to each user by means of pattern matching technology - similar to that of a retinal scan - that can work out exactly which calls are business-oriented and which are personal," he says.
"And because it uses two months` worth of previous data taken from the TMS as a benchmark, it is not really something that staff could influence by changing their call patterns, even if they were aware there was a monitoring system in place.
"Basically, as long as your organisation has a TMS in place, the data is available to you. So the only question that remains then is do you know how much money you are losing?"
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