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Introduction Call Logging Systems What to do with a Call Logger Operational Performance Planning Conclusion |
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As soon as you start looking at any call logging product you are immediately dragged into their literature. They provide you with a wealth of reports covering a wide range of scenarios, some of which may concern you and some may not. Their literature immediately starts shooting out questions such as
None of which look, on the surface, to you, as a conscientious professional, irrelevant. The problem is that there is no structure.
Be warned - this is exactly the sort of field that the intellectual scoundrel seeks. There are a million and one details in which they can hide. If you ask them in detail about one point they pop up behind another saying "Yes, but have you thought of this" and so on. It reveals on their part woolly thinking, and this is also reflected in their software. A lack of thoroughgoing data analysis leads to inappropriate data structures. The tell tale signs are when limits, such as the number of levels you may have in your organisation or the number of call records you may process for example, are introduced for non-commercial reasons.
This, like other fields, is full of detail. The reaction of some managers is, this is a big field I can't afford to get too embroiled. Depending on your background and culture there are broadly three alternatives - delegate to a member of staff, bring in the consultants, or outsource telecommunications management.
Whatever you do, security should be an important consideration. The data emanating from the switchboard can reveal all sorts of detail. For some organisations, if the data from the switchboard got into the hands of a competitor it could be catastrophic. It may also contain highly personal and confidential detail. In some countries there are laws that ban access to it. What call logging data is available to whom is an important, and sometimes neglected, consideration.
The blanket label of user is not good enough. "What job functions legitimately require access to this data and for what purpose?" is a question that should be asked. Grazing on data, particularly with the advent of the Internet, is in danger of becoming a full time occupation with some individuals.
You may be lucky and have just the right member of staff to be able to see the wood from the trees and the requisite technical skills to be able to tune your telephone system. On the other hand, to recall an image of some years ago, you may just be turfing someone like a great Mammoth into the tar pits where they will flounder in a mass of details and make little progress.
The consultants, on the other hand, are always likely to be expensive and whether they are good or bad is again a bit of a lottery though they'll never admit it. They will generally have standard solutions to telephone systems and they'll foist them on you, whether they are appropriate or not.
Before you start you need some sort of perspective before you get dragged in.
What you will need to decide is which issues are important to you. This will depend on the nature of your organisation. Most suppliers of call loggers concentrate on the economics of the operation and presume that this will be the overriding interest for everybody. This is not always the case. One telecommunications manager that we know in London is more interested in the reliability of his carriers network than he is in the cost of the telephone calls. Even a small break of service for his organisation has the potential of losing his organisation thousands of pounds while his traders sit idle. This consideration, for him, far outweighs the thought of the savings of a few hundreds he might make if he switched carriers. He's been there and come back! There are "holes" in some suppliers' networks as our experience in programming telephone exchanges has shown us. Other organisations, such as some local authorities that we know, may be dealing with a preponderance of incoming calls and are more interested with the level of service that they are achieving.
For commercial organisations, which areas you focus on will depend on the circumstances you find yourself in. It could be that you are involved in a cost cutting exercise and the economics are vital to you. On the other hand if business is booming you may be less interested in costs and need to focus on questions such as "Do I have enough capacity to deal with the current level of traffic the business is generating?" "Are we missing potentially valuable calls?"
You may be a mature user who has been carefully monitoring your system for some time; in this case you may want to employ the data available to you to monitor the finer detail of your organisations operation. The data could, for example, be used as input to a Communications Audit within your company.
Having introduced the topic and given you some idea of its breadth and depth, we now consider how these issues are considered and addressed by the call logging software available on the market.
The essence of call logging is simple. It is made complicated by the constructs that are placed on it by the user and the carrier.
The following animated graphic depicts call logging and how the various parties contrive to complicate it. The animated graphic takes a little while to unfold but is worthwhile. You will need a fully sized window and a largish screen to see it at its best.
Fig. 1 The PABX collects data on the elements depicted in this diagram. When a call is made it records which extension is connected to which trunk line. The PABX also records the digits that were dialled and the date and the time of the call and the duration.
Fig. 2 Not many organisations describe themselves solely in terms of extensions. Most organisations describe themselves in terms of the people that work for it and to to an organisational structure as simplistically depicted here.
Fig. 3 Extensions are then related to the people.
Fig. 4 - Fig. 8 The carrier uses the dialled digits to interpret the nature of the call. These digits are used as one parameter to cost the call. Calls can be broadly classified into Local, National, International, Special Rate and Mobile calls
Fig. 9 The Carrier further complicates the call costing by varying charges depending on time.
The trunk lines are connected to the telephone network by your telecommunications supplier (e.g. BT)
The PABX (or switchboard in common parlance) has some processing capabilities. It is able to switch traffic and keeps track of time. It is essentially on the labelled elements in Fig. 1 that that the PABX generates Call Detail Records (CDR's) also known as SMDR's (Station Message Detail Records). It captures the dialled digits and may, depending on the make of the PABX, be able to capture the Calling Line Identifier (CLI) for incoming calls. The telecommunications company can pass these details to it. In the UK this usually requires the payment of a small fee. The routing of calls in the above diagram is not always from extension to trunk or vice versa. There is also the possibility of extension to extension, an internal call. Some PABX's also allow trunk to trunk calls - this is the mechanism used to perpetrate large-scale frauds. Calls can also be transferred either by the originator or the receiver. Add to this the possibility of conference calls and even the definition of what a telephone call is becomes elusive.
The PABX normally generates records as calls are made and received. It sends the details out on, usually, a serial port. This data is then captured by the call logging system.
This is the simple single site model.
The million and one details that we spoke of earlier derive from the constructs that are put on the end of the lines and complexities that have been imposed by telecommunications companies on the passage of time.
The majority of extensions, in most organisations, relate to people. The people in turn are related to an organisational structure. Most call loggers require you to import this detail, thereby giving them the capability to generate reports relating to people or organisational entities. Some extensions are fax machines, while others may be modems - yet more detail that you may choose to report on. Internet access is also an issue; it will depend on the nature of your network whether your PABX generates call records corresponding to your internet access.
Each trunk line runs to a telecommunications company. The line may be ordinary telephone lines, a private wire or an ISDN connection and may attract different tariffs. Furthermore it is possible to use another carrier by the use of access codes.
The cost of a call is determined by a number of factors. The destination of the call, be it local, regional, national, international, mobile, pagers, personal numbers, special rate services or premium rate services is one factor. The carrier and the service chosen within a carrier are others. The day of the week and the time of the day at which the call is made are yet others. It may be a particular number that attracts a special discount. It could be that with this carrier you have exceeded a certain threshold value for the charge period and all calls are now subject to some discounted rate.
Within each of the factors that affect a call charge that we have identified above there is yet more detail. To illustrate, consider international calls - there are 43 different rates in one carriers service.
The underlying truth is that telecommunications companies are trying to obfuscate charging mechanisms so that it is increasingly difficult to make like for like comparisons between one carrier and another. In so doing they have generated a wealth of detail.
The complexity that the telecommunication companies have added to the trunk lines together with your organisational structure and the different rates that are used on the time dimension all add to the complexity of a phone call. This in turn leads to the ability to analyse the data generated by your switchboard using many of these minutiae and from there to the myriad of questions that can be formulated about it.
If you're going to run a call logging system the description of your organisational structure, together with employees and their extensions are going to have to be input to the system. Furthermore your external network needs to be described, what trunk lines are connected to which carrier. The system will also need costing tables. You should also recognise that this data needs to be maintained or it will get out of date.
This is the low point. We have at least understood it, even if we don't, as yet, know what to do about it.
The essential functions of a call logger are
1. To collect raw data from the PABX
2. To cost the call and add missing details such as destination or origin
3. To provide some sort of reporting capability.
Call logging has been around for a long time - over 20 years. In those days it wasn't just the 2 bytes of the date that they thought about making savings on; processors were a lot slower as well, and this meant they weren't as adept at multi-tasking. The result was that the 3 functions above were often separated, and extra hardware was sometimes added - such as buffer boxes.
It is possible for modern processes to cope with these combined functions in a single program, however there are still many products that persist with the 3 separate functions and some even contrive to make it more.
As is so often the case little problems such as this are tackled head on by the sales and marketing boys, easy, turn it into a benefit. What will be trotted out to you is that collecting data in a buffer box means that it is "more reliable". Given a failure of the computer system you will not lose data. Back it up with an uninterrupted power supply and it is true that this is a reliable system. The down side is that the data isn't available for analysis as it comes off of the PABX. If your average call answer time has shot up to 40 seconds in the last 20 minutes then you won't know until you've loaded the data and run the report - which may be tomorrow, next week, next month? In any case it's too late to react, even if you do notice. The loss of real-time data is a real disadvantage. Bureau services also suffer from this disadvantage. Furthermore there is an ergonomic consideration in this type of system. When you come to load the reporting element of the system, it generally realises that there is data to be loaded and it sets about loading it. This may take some time depending on the volume. A consideration that purveyors of such systems encourage you to forget. There is an advantage such systems enjoy. Since data is only added in bulk and not in real time it means that the system can work with fixed data sets and so they perform some tasks at bewilderingly fast speeds.
Buffer boxes also find application in multi-site solutions. Their presence is more acceptable in this instance. They are also much favoured by call logging bureaux. If remote access to these boxes is required then you will quite often find it stipulated that they should be attached to a modem and directly to an outside line. This conveniently bypasses the PABX for 2 good reasons.
1. it can be technically difficult to negotiate a switchboard with a modem connection
2. the true cost of ownership can be masked as it won't appear in call logging reports
If you are satisfied that off-line data collection is justified then, in this day and age, it really is not a sensible solution to have lines dedicated to this function. There is no good reason why the data should not be compressed and sent via an e-mail system - in any event no part of the process should require human intervention.
The whole ethos of traditional call logging systems has been for the system to sit there and collect data, and then wait for someone to dream up some questions to ask it. They are essentially passive animals. It's a bit like taking the dog for a walk. If you don't do it, it really won't matter that much. If you do do it you'll probably be that much better for it. This is too passive a role for such systems.
The e-logging philosophy as embodied by Telecost is to act, not as a passive agent in monitoring your telephone system, but to act as an active agent. It monitors the performance of your telephone system in real time and actively informs you, via e-mail or other mechanisms, rather than waiting to be quizzed - the much sought after but so rarely attained shift in the paradigm! They'll all be trying to copy it soon, but we're not worried we have a significant lead and we'll be building on it for at least a year!
Download a copy of the demonstration software
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