Catching and combating telephony misuse and fraud

Businesses of all sizes are always looking for simple but effective ways to cut costs and where possible, streamline and improve the services they offer - even more so in the current economic situation. In many cases, the tough economic climate has; unfortunately, forced workers to take advantage of work telephony systems and use either a work mobile handset or a desktop telephone for personal use and, in more severe cases, to call premium rates.

This is forcing businesses to review the way in which staff actually use their telephone systems. Ultimately, this is a positive step and can result in a business streamlining its procedures to gain instant cost savings while improving customer service. Over the past 12 months, inquiries from companies that have fallen victim to telephony fraud, hacking and misuse have increased. Workers have been known to use the desktop phone for personal purposes or to call premium rate 900 numbers, with their unknowing employer footing the bill.

This extends to outsourced staff, including cleaning teams that often operate outside of standard office hours and more often than not are left to their own devices. We saw in once instance, premium rate number companies paying cleaners to dial a number and leave it hanging while they were in the office, only hanging up at the end of the evening when they left the building. Without close attention, this kind of activity can slip through the net with the company left to deal with the consequences and costs.

Invariably, threats can also come from international criminals as well as internal sources. Organized gangs have comprehensive software that enables a company's obsolete numbers to be hacked into and then used to dial out to premium and foreign extensions. This ‘toll fraud' is executed in a way that means calls can be left open, leaving an extremely large telephone bill, if not caught and combated. Telephone fraud is not a new issue, but it remains a topical one and one not to be taken lightly. In these stringent economic times, we would recommend that businesses, regardless of size, address policies and procedures in the workplace to ensure that staff know and understand what acceptable telephony use is and what is not. In hand with this, businesses should contact their telephony provider to gauge how they can work together to better manage and evaluate their telephony use.

This should not be a lengthy or complicated process, nor should the analysis procedure be laborious. In most cases, telephony providers will recommend that companies look to adopt a telemanagement and call recording solution. In doing so, businesses can obtain a comprehensive breakdown of the complete communications system and also have the ability to cap calls depending on length, rate and total cost. The presence of such a solution often puts the onus on the employee to improve the way they conduct themselves on the corporate telephone before senior management even address the reports such an application generates. Additionally having the ability to pull off ad-hoc detailed reports and highlight anomalous call activity ensures that directors can slice bills and prevent similar occurrences of telephone misuse from happening in the future.The call recording element of such a tool is key to the bigger picture as it provides directors with the evidence they need to drill down to the real issue, post-event. Not only can it be used as a means to document incidences when mitigating fraud, but it can also act as a way to train staff and strengthen the level of service offered to customers. By monitoring call activity, businesses can gain substantial savings while also improving processes, safe in the knowledge that their system is not being abused by those inside or outside the organization.