With budget cuts everywhere, especially in government spending, schools are looking for ways to cut costs right and left, especially when they can do so without effecting spending on student-related activities. So, they scour the books looking for possible ways to tighten their belt so they can continue to offer the students the robust educational and extracurricular experience they deserve.

In doing so, a public school system in Indiana was having issues with managing the cost of their phone system. There were a couple of areas where they felt they could really “cut the fat” in their phone bill if only they could get to the root cause. First, they were having an issue with prank 911 calls being placed from somewhere within the building and they were unable to pinpoint from where these calls were coming. Each subsequent time 911 was dialed and the local authorities came to the school, the school was being charged a nominal fee. And second, the school was incurring increases in telephone bill costs and had no explanation for this random increase in costs.

After installing a call management solution with fraud protection, the school found some very interesting activities. First, they were able to identify the classroom from where the calls were being placed to 911 and they were able to catch the culprit and provide appropriate punishment. Second, they were able to identify the source of their increased telephone expenses. One of the teachers had decided to start an arts and crafts business on the side and was using the school’s phone system to place calls to vendors, customers, logistical companies, etc. They were able to eliminate the long distance phone activity and, thus, reduce their monthly telephony costs immediately.

These are just two examples of how call management solutions with fraud protection can help an organization save money on their monthly bills. Call management solutions with fraud protection offer high quality, real time monitoring of activities such as incoming, outgoing, international and out of hours calls, together with 24×7 monitoring of a voice network’s status.

Fraud protection software provides three types of monitoring:

• Call Monitors – Display user-defined lists of calls in chronological order

• Alarms – Triggered by user-defined telephonic events, provide instant notification of telecom usage that may adversely impact or effect the running of a business’s voice systems

• Threshold Alarms – Allow businesses to set warning levels (60% – 90%) that trigger before the actual alarm level is breached

Traditionally, call management solutions are used to analyze historical call traffic, for example; investigating calls made by individual departments at the end of each month. This means that organizations don’t always have the immediate, hands-on control they need to manage their ongoing communication costs.

Control Costs and Usage

• Identify excessive personal telephone calls

• Set expected spends for individual carriers

• Monitor calls made outside normal business hours

• Monitor switches for no calls during a set period

The opportunities that this school system found to cut costs were unique to their circumstance but not entirely unique in their existence. Every organization has opportunities available to cut costs in their telecom expenditures. It seems like a simple thing, but most organizations have no idea where they spend their telecom budget or where they could cut those costs. Call management systems with fraud guard offer that visibility so that organizations can control their costs rather than having their costs control them.

By: Shelley Veazie

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