Nermine Shaker
Principal Consultant
Abilita Telecom Consultants
nshaker@abilita.com

There is a very clear reason that so many new technologies appear every year - new technologies help keep businesses competitive and successful. As computers grow ever more capable and inexpensive, businesses continue to take advantage of them. This causes the tech industry to continually come up with new models, in an incredibly profitable feedback loop.

The same phenomenon has begun in the world of business communication. In addition to the classic hard line telephone and radio systems, there are now digital phone options, voice mail, videoconferences, email, and many more options. If a business needs to communicate, the world of telecom offers a solution to their specific need.

I Can Do What With My Telephone?

Of course, every new technology brings new problems and challenges. Much as computers introduced a whole range of compatibility issues and headaches for early adopters, modern telecom technologies have raised a range of new issues.

Relatively few members of any organization actually understand the specific workings of any one telecom system in their office, let alone how the entire system operates. A lack of understanding about any one portion can directly impact the company's bottom line.

That’s Not How We Do It

This issue affects larger businesses in particular. A small, local baker really only needs a simple phone line and voice mail system, for example. An interstate or international corporation, on the other hand, needs an entire phone system for each of its offices, and perhaps a larger network tying them all together. This kind of effort requires not only a major investment, but it rarely develops all at once.

Businesses acquire other companies, adopting their offices and existing equipment, and occasionally the communications contracts they've already signed. This creates an inherent difficulty in oversight and control over the communications network, and can be a source of costs that a business shouldn’t have to pay.

For those companies that don't want to keep ignoring – and paying for – the problems, there is an alternative; the professional telecommunications audit, (similar to the concept of a tax audit but without the pain and fear). Simply put, a telecom audit is a professional, thorough review of an entire telecommunications network, encompassing billing and contracts as well as data integrity and security, efficiency, and policy.

Specifically, a telecom audit can cover three general areas. First is the review of records and information. This portion of the audit covers areas like data integrity (ascertaining if the information is being stored and archived properly, for easy and long term access) and data security (is the information accessible to people it shouldn't be?), and can include recommended policy revisions for better performance.

Next is a review of the technologies themselves, and whether adopting an alternative system might improve matters. Finally there is the review of the financial side, ranging from the obvious (comparing different phone contracts for pricing and options) to the esoteric (tariffs and call volume versus network capability). Not every audit will include every portion. As mentioned in the bakery example, not every business has the same telecom needs.

The Devil That You Know vs. the Devil That You Don’t

The defining reason to get a telecom audit is one of information. Auditors don't come in and solve a business' communications problems; they simply review the procedures and options currently in place and make recommendations on how to improve the state of things compared to how it exists. Frequently, some of their findings aren't related to external matters. A department could be losing customers because employees are not filing customer contact information properly, leading to longer wait times and missed calls or appointments, and an audit could catch this.

The advantage lies in having an independent, external audit when possible. This doesn't imply wrongdoing on the part of internal users, or anyone attempting deception. Simple familiarity with a system could prevent a user from seeing that they aren't using it to the best of its capability, and an outside pair of eyes can provide an impartial, expanded view.

Communication is the lifeblood of the modern economy. It doesn't matter how critical a piece of information is, nothing is gained if it is not communicated to the proper audience. As businesses grow more and more dependent on advanced telecommunications systems, new problems will emerge. Every system develops difficulties as it grows more complex, a fact of nature that cannot be avoided. A professional, independent telecom audit is a useful tool that can identify these problems, and allow a successful business to take steps to maximize their communications potential and their bottom line.

About the author:

Nermine Shaker has a M.S. in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University with more than twenty years of experience in planning, implementing, managing and consulting on telecommunications projects.  Ms. Shaker has generated millions of dollars worth of savings for her clients.  She is a Principal Consultant at Abilita.

Nermine can be reached at (310) 793-0711 or nshaker@abilita.com

Nermine Shaker
Principal Consultant
Abilita Telecom Consultants
nshaker@abilita.com

Telecommunications consultants can help your company reduce expenses, update your services and also provide ongoing support.  When looking for a telecom expense management company or a telecom consulting firm for a specific project, you should keep the following questions in mind.

How long have they been in business and how big is their company?

A good telecom consultant should be up to date on all the latest technology in order for you to make the best choices for your company.   There are many resources on the Internet to check on a consulting firm. The Better Business Bureau has a website that allows you to check companies that have had complaints or lawsuits against them. A consumer website called ripoffreport.com has search capabilities that allow you to look up a company that may have consumer complaints against it.

What is their area of telecom expertise?

When looking for the right telecom consulting firm, you will want to know what areas they specialize in. The subject of telecommunications covers a broad spectrum.  Once you know what you’re looking for – telecom auditing, expense management, possible migration to VoIP, upgrading equipment or services – you can look for a firm that specializes in that area.

Do they have references or case studies?

Testimonials from former clients as well as present ones are helpful. Knowing past and present clients helps you establish how much work the firm can handle and how it handles it. A number of customers who are pleased with a firm's work says a lot about a firm's character and the people who work there. Knowing who the firm's clients are on a continual basis is also helpful. If clients return for business, it shows the firm is reliable and has satisfied customers.

Do they represent any vendors or sell any products?

You should ask the telecom consulting firm if they use specific products made by a particular seller or if they sell that seller's products. You should also ask them if they sell any of their own products. If a firm sells another vendor's products, they probably raise the price a little to build in a profit for themselves, much like mechanics who buy a part from an auto parts store. If the firm sells their own products, the prices will probably be more competitive; however, if you have the expertise, you might want to check into getting your own materials once you know what is needed and let the consulting firm do the installation.

In addition to possible price increases for profits, if you are quoted an inexpensive price, you might be getting involved with a company that receives commissions for products or services they recommend.  Your telecom consulting firm should be unbiased and should be acting your best interest – that means that they shouldn’t be recommending their own carriers or services.  That’s why it’s important to know if your telecom consultant represents any providers or vendors.

What are their fees?

Once you decide who is taking care of the materials, the next step is to get the consulting firm's prices. There are a few ways that consulting firms collect fees – hourly or daily, by project or by contingency.

A project can be billed hourly or by the day and often includes consultants’ expenses.  A fee-based project is a set amount of money paid to do a set project.  Contingency based means that the payment is based on savings to the client.  For telecom auditing, this is the most popular – the consultants get a percentage of the money they save the client.

There are also some arrangements for consultants that stay on, working on a continuing basis to monitor equipment and allowing for continuous improvement. You would need to know their fees for this service if it’s one you are interested in pursuing.   You may want to be wary of a consultant who asks for a large upfront retainer or advance payments.  Your consultant should want to work with your company for the best possible solution for you.

Before choosing a telecom-consulting firm, it is important to get all of these questions answered to your satisfaction. A good analysis of your own company including what your goals are would be of benefit to decide what type of telecom systems you need. For instance, whether your company provides products and/or services locally or globally would make a difference on what installations are required. If you are local and want to expand, that could affect the system used as well.  You want to get a consulting firm that is expert in the goals you are trying to achieve; one that will save you money in the long run by helping you improve what you have, or establish a profitable system to start with. You will want to decide what services you need and find a reputable firm that provides those services.

About the author:

Nermine Shaker has a M.S. in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University with more than twenty years of experience in planning, implementing, managing and consulting on telecommunications projects.  Ms. Shaker has generated millions of dollars worth of savings for her clients.  She is a Principal Consultant at Abilita. 

Nermine can be reached at (310) 793-0711 or nshaker@abilita.com

Nermine Shaker
Principal Consultant
Abilita Telecom Consultants
nshaker@abilita.com

For most business owners, just looking at your phone bill can cause panic or dread.  Instead of checking line by line for accuracy in the invoice, you probably look at the total, sigh, and write a check.  With all the new services available, you need to understand your invoice so you don’t get overcharged or billed for something you’re not getting. 

The FCC requires telephone companies to provide you with clear, plain language in their invoices when they describe their services.  However, even then, you may not understand what you are being charged for.

Here is a list of terminology associated with your business telephone bill, your wireless bills, or both.

Access Charge:  fees charged by a local phone company for the use of its local network.

Airtime Charges:  These are per-minute charges for the time you spend talking on your wireless telephone. Some wireless providers will round fractions of minutes to the next highest one, two, or three minutes. 

Billing Increments:  A call duration measurement unit expressed in seconds or minutes.  Depending on your service provider, some services are measured and billed in sixty-second increments and some may be in durations of six or even ten seconds.  For example, if you have one minute billing increments, any call less than 1 minute will be billed as 1 minute.

BTN (Billing Telephone Number):  Your main billing telephone number.

Cramming:  When a charge is placed on your phone bill that you didn’t order or authorize.

Detailed Billing:  This service provides detailed information such as date, time, duration, type of call (incoming or outgoing), number called, or calling party, for each call.

Direct Dialing:  When a customer is pre-subscribed with a long distance company and makes a call using 1+ the area code (or country code) and the telephone number, without operator assistance or using a dial-around number.

Directory Assistance:  Charges for dialing 411 or (area code) 555-1212 for directory assistance calls.

Domestic Call:  Any call that originates and terminates within the United States.

Downloading Fees:  Fees charged for downloading options offered by your wireless service provider, such as ring tones.  If your plan includes Internet access, these are fees for downloading data from the Internet.

E911 Charges:  These are Enhanced 911 or E911 service.  This lets your wireless telephone automatically transmit your geographic position to emergency responders when you dial 911.  Your provider is charged for this and may choose to pass their costs on to you. 

Features Charges:  Both wireline and wireless telephone companies offer features such as call forwarding, call waiting, voice mail, three-way calling, and caller identification.  These services may show up as separate charges on your bill.

FCC (Federal Communications Commission):  The United States government agency that regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. Established by the Communications Act of 1934, the FCC's jurisdiction includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.

Federal Excise Tax:  A three percent tax applied only to local service that is billed separately from long distance service. In 2006, the IRS stopped enforcing the toll portion of the tax.  The tax still applies to customers who only subscribe to local phone service.  Earlier this year H.R 3011 was introduced (Telephone Excise Tax Repeal Act of 2009) to repeal the federal excise tax on communications services.

Interstate Calls:  Calls that start in one state and end in another state.

Intrastate Calls:  Calls that start and end within the same state.

LDU:  Long Distance Usage is the amount of long distance a customer uses.

Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) Billing:  When a customer receives their invoice directly from their Local Exchange Carrier (your local phone company).

Local Number Portability (LNP):  This allows customers to retain their existing local telephone numbers when switching from one telephone service provider to another. Companies may pass on to customers the fees they are charged. These are fees and not taxes.

Minimum Minute Charge:  Some calling plans will have a minimum number of minutes that they bill for a call length.  A 10-minute minimum charge would mean that even if you talk less than 10 minutes on a call, you would still be billed for a 10-minute call.

Minimum Monthly Charge:  Some long distance calling plans have a minimum monthly charge.  This means that if your plan has a $50 monthly minimum, your monthly bill will always be at least $50 even if you have a month where you have only made $25 in calls.

Minimum Usage Charge:  A calling plan where you would pay a small fee if your monthly long distance usage is under a certain amount.  This is different from a minimum monthly fee.

Monthly Calling Plan Charge:  Charges applicable to any monthly calling plan. For example, unlimited long distance calling on your wireline bill or unlimited minutes on your wireless bill.

Operator Assisted Calls:  These are charges for any calls that are connected by an operator.  Usually, it is more expensive to have an operator help you with a call.

Roaming Charges:  Roaming charges require you to pay for using your wireless telephone outside of the "home" service area as defined by your service provider in your service plan or contract.  Usually the charges are higher when roaming.  In addition to roaming charges, there might be a daily access fee.

SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module):  Also known as a "smart card," this is the physical card in a mobile telephone that contains all necessary information for uniquely identifying a subscriber.

Single Bill Fee:  This is a fee that the carrier can charge for combining your local and long distance charges onto one bill. This fee is not an FCC charge and some companies waive it.

SLA (Service Level Agreement):  Documentation or a contract that details service quality commitments between a carrier and the subscriber.

Slamming:  The unauthorized conversion of a customer's long distance phone service from their current carrier to a new long distance carrier.  Slamming is illegal.

State & Local Taxes:  Taxes that are imposed by state, local, and municipal governments.

Toll Call:  Any call, subject to charge, to a destination outside of the local service area of the calling station.

Telecommunications Relay Service (TRS):  This is a charge that pays for the relay center to transmit and translate calls for people with hearing or speech disabilities.

Text Messaging:  This service allows sending of short messages, usually less than one hundred characters in length. This will either be a flat monthly fee or a per-message fee.

Universal Service Fund (USF):  This is a charge on some long distance services to offset a carrier's mandatory payment into the Federal Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes rural, low income, and health and education telecommunications customers. The FCC sets the USF rate every three months.  It applies only to state-to-state and international phone calls.  The FCC doesn’t require this charge to be passed on to customers, and each carrier decides if and how to recover its Universal Service costs.   If this line item appears on your bill, it means the carrier has chosen to pass their charges onto you.

You should check your phone bill every month and make an effort to understand the meaning of each item to make sure that you’re paying the proper rates for your contract.  If you make any changes to your lines, make sure they apply the right charges to the change.  If you see something that you don’t understand, ask your provider to explain the charge.  If you have a Telecom Expense Management company working for you, they can explain the charges as well as make sure you’re not billed for something you’re not using.

About the author:

Nermine Shaker has a M.S. in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University with more than twenty years of experience in planning, implementing, managing and consulting on telecommunications projects.  Ms. Shaker has generated millions of dollars worth of savings for her clients.  She is a Principal Consultant at Abilita. 

Nermine Shaker
Principal Consultant
Abilita Telecom Consultants
nshaker@abilita.com

Telecom audit is an important process for any organization. Human error, failure to pay close attention to details, constraint of time in checking long telecom bills, and insufficient knowledge of new technology and regulations - these mistakes can take a toll on the revenue of a company. Avoiding all these potential problems is an integral part of the expense management of an organization. Many small losses can add up to a huge amount. In order to curb this waste, organizations can either use an automated telecom audit tool, a Telecom Management professional, or a combination of the two.

Telecom audit is a process that helps to detect and reveal even the smallest errors that waste money. Thus, it provides an opportunity not only to recover lost revenue, but also ensures that errors are not repeated.

Telecom audit ideally has three stages:

Acquiring Documents to Create an Inventory Database

The first stage involves the collection of telecom invoices. These invoices show the costs over time and the customer records. Telecom audit companies at times use software in this stage that both acts as a database and helps in analyzing trends.

Depending on the size of your company, just collecting these invoices could be a very time-consuming job. Start with the local phone bills and work outward. The long distance bills may be on the same invoice or billed separately. Wireless services can be billed as a group or individual accounts. Check to see if each bill matches with a known phone. For Internet service bills, they may be on a separate bill or, if the local provider offers broadband with local service, they may be with the local phone invoice.

The next thing to collect is voice and data service contracts. These include local and long distance service, wireless phones, telecom equipment and any maintenance service agreements.

Make the time to request your Customer Service Records (CSRs) from your provider. Your providers may take a few weeks to get to your requests, but it’s worth the wait. These records contain your unique data that will ultimately be the foundation of your telecom audit. They are written in Universal Service Order Codes (USOC) and they are an itemized listing of all your lines, services, and features.

You should also gather any agreements for Directory Advertising or Yellow Pages. If your company is large, sometimes a publicity or advertising department handles these agreements. The documents are important because they will specify the rates that apply to all advertising, when it was ordered and by whom.

Other documents to get access to are tariffs. Tariffs are the provider’s official documents that break down all the rules, service offers, rates, etc. that they offer. You can find these rules on your provider’s website. Also gather any tax information that applies to your company. Charities, schools, churches, and some nonprofit organizations may be exempt from state and/or federal taxes.

Analyzing All the Data

The second stage of audit involves the comparison of inventory costs against pricing plans. And the first thing required is an inventory audit. In this section, you look at your organization's inventory of telecom assets. Instead of looking for spot errors, this kind of telecom audit looks for trend information. This data aids the company in deciding whether it needs to expand its telecom resources or to re-deploy its existing resources.

Now a comparison of cost against pricing plans can be made. Here’s where a telecom audit firm can be very helpful. They keep a record of current pricing and tariff changes. With the help of these records and databases, the audit firms can provide a cost effective plan for their clients.

Reporting and Recommendations

The third and crucial stage involves reports and recommendations. If you are doing this audit yourself, after looking at all the data, this is where you decide where you might be able to save money. A telecom audit firm will also give you their reports and recommendations at this time. Along with the presentation of their reports and analysis, they also give their suggestions for improvements and savings that have been identified in the process.

They may find errors in you bills and suggest disputing some charges. They may find credits you never received and apply for refunds for you. Today’s telecom bills contain many errors that you won’t find unless you do an audit.

Since billing errors play havoc on draining the organization's capital, partnering with companies that provide solutions to check such errors is becoming increasingly popular. When using a telecom-auditing firm, there are two ways to approach it. One of them is the 'contingency' method, where the telecom audit firms receive a percentage of the money they saved clients. The second can be a 'fixed fee' approach. Generally, small and medium firms go for the contingency process, whereas large firms go for the second approach, as it is easier to manage.

No matter which approach a firm takes, one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that telecom audits should be conducted by both big and small businesses to keep a check on their expenses. The telecom audit process is complex and time-consuming, but fortunately, there are companies that provide such services, and instituting a regular telecom audit can ensure cost optimization for any firm, and almost surely improve its bottom line.

About the author:

Nermine Shaker has a M.S. in Telecommunications Management from Golden Gate University with more than twenty years of experience in planning, implementing, managing and consulting on telecommunications projects. Ms. Shaker has generated millions of dollars worth of savings for her clients. She is a Principal Consultant at Abilita.

Nermine can be reached at (310) 793-0711 or nshaker@abilita.com