We have all heard about individuals being hit with excessive telephone bills detailing call charges or roaming data charges running into the hundreds and sometimes thousands. Sadly when the phone bill lands it can often be too late to avoid having to cover the excessive costs as the calls have been made.
Telephone fraud on your office landlines is a growing concern with companies now hacking into on site telephone systems to generate calls to high pence per minute numbers and there is always the question of telephone calls being placed to high cost numbers by you or your team without knowing. We have even seen a recent case where a Freephone number had received a high number of calls from a UK payphone number resulting in a high telephone bill for these calls rated at over 50 pence per minute.
So what can you actually do about this problem in an attempt to minimise your risk?
We recommend you work with a supplier of telephone calls that can remove some of this risk for you, most telephone operators nowadays rate telephone traffic into billing platforms on a daily basis and most billing platforms can be set to produce alarms for unusual call traffic. We recommend you check with your current supplier of fixed line telephone calls how they are monitoring your call costs for you and what they are doing to assist in picking up on excessive call charges sooner rather than later.
Naturally if you can be made aware of unusual calls and costs early on in the month you have the opportunity to stop this happening quickly at that time, rather than becoming aware of this when you receive your telephone bill over a month later which has grown to a small fortune on costs by then.
Our billing platform allows us to create rules by account and telephone line which means we can pick up on excessive call costs very quickly with our clients and take a proactive approach to resolving the problem before it gets out of control.
So our advice to you here is simply, check what fail safes are in place with you current provider and if none then consider shifting, most companies will have the tools to help protect your business this way, but many will not have taken the lead on setting them up and you may need to do this yourself.
If you would like any advice on this or even a second opinion on a large telephone bill you have had then please contact us on 0800 50 533 50 or complete an enquiry form here.
