CEO Magazine - Vol 5 No.3 2006

Many companies pay massive telecommunications bills every month and yet they no longer have a telecomms manager as the function has been added to the IT manager's already large portfolio.

This is understandable from the point of view of the convergence of voice and data in recent years. However, as Mario Pretorius, a director of Expectra Telephony Audits (Pty) Ltd, points out telecommunications and IT are actually two very different animals.

"Big firms spend in excess of R6-million a month on telecommunications costs," notes Expectra Managing Director, Natie Bekker. "Call costing is seen as a necessary evil but most of the managers responsible for this do not have the time or manpower to analyse the situation. Everyone will acknowledge that some abuse of calls is going on but few realise that it can easily account for 40-50% of their costs."

Expectra is in the business of auditing and optimizing companies' telecommunication charges, and in many cases will also recover overpayments from service providers. Expectra has built up substantial experience of the complexities of dealing with service providers and since 2001 the company has built a credible record in auditing, recovering hundreds of thousands of Rands for some of their clients. In a number of cases, the recovered amounts passed the R1-million mark.
There are patterns in the numbers dialed, length of call and times of calls, among others, that can expose billing errors or fraud and as Expectra works on a 'pay for performance' basis, there is no risk entailed by the client in inviting an audit. Only when monies are recovered or savings programmes show results are the newfound proceeds shared.

The auditing aspect is, however, only about 20% of Expectra's work. The other 80% involves analysing how the voice and data system is working and finding better ways of structuring these communications.

One aspect that can offer significant savings is utilizing the appropriate technology and with new solutions coming onto the market all the time companies are not always aware of developments that would assist them in bringing their call costs down.

"With the advent of the second network operator and the arrival of new players there will also be a myriad of ways to restructure telecommunications," shares Bekker. "In South Africa there has been little choice whereas internationally least cost routing often focuses on finding which carrier is cheapest at which time. South Africa will change and as a result companies should be careful of long-term lock-in with a certain service provider."

Technology is not the only factor in lowering call costs. In fact spend in call costs is directly proportional to human behaviour and it is this more challenging area that Expectra also exposes through their audits and evaluations. Issues include calls that are not essential, or of a business nature, large companies calling themselves through their own switchboards, excessive calls to cell phones and blatant fraud.

When people know they are being watched their behaviour changes but unfortunately the unhelpful tendencies creep back in as soon as the observation ends. As a result an ongoing process of auditing is often necessary.

"We are often faced with a culture that sees phone calls at work as a fringe benefit," explains Pretorius. "We also have the propensity to talk too much and as such we need to think out of the box to find creative ways of modifying behaviour and therefore driving costs down."