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Telecom Audit Techniques: Observational and Personal Surveys
One of the most useful tools for helping you to conduct a successful audit of your telecommunications services is the "survey".
Surveys come in two categories:
1)Observation Surveys
2) Surveys via Personal Interviews
Each plays an important role in helping you to obtain the most reliable information possible and to uncover the maximum amount of savings throughout your telecom audit.
Why Do Telecom Surveys?
Imagine a detective attempting to solve a high-profile case successfully - and never interviewing any witnesses or personally visiting the scene of the crime! It would never happen (and certainly make for bad crime TV!).
Remote and/or on-premises observation and interview surveys are critical to the information gathering and hypotheses testing processes. Surveys are the "glue" that helps all the hard data you've collected come together.
Surveying Through Observation
On-premises and remote observation can uncover problems in many areas. It is best to focus your efforts on one or more of the following items:
Central Office Circuits and Related Items - identify all circuits that are brought to the premises. The demarc is the natural point to observe. Be sure the demarc is properly labeled. If the demarc is not labeled, you will need to determine if there are other circuits entering the premises via non-centralized locations.
Equipment and Maintenance - identify terminals and other billed items. You may have to complete a census of relevant items in and about the common equipment area.
Layout and Usage - locate equipment/departments/functions to suggest or support possible and reasonable changes in provisioning, such as sharing of a line for a FAX or PC. You can also gather relevant traffic data observing and tracking attendant call handling, or observing signal-light activity on trunk circuit packs.
For remote observation, look at carrier and maintenance provisioning items such as service charges and white and yellow pages directory listings and ads.
Specifics of Personal Interview Surveys
Aside from billing records and customer service records, personally surveying the users of your telecom services may be the single most critical and beneficial method of gathering the information you need to complete a successful audit.
At TelCon Associates, we've used a system for on-site and remote interviews that has been very
successful and worked well for many years.
The content of your interviewed surveys can be as simple or as complex as you would like to make them.
However long or short, your interview surveys should at least consist of and include the following items:
General Data about the user such as name, position in the company, address of phone and type of business at the surveyed location (ex. sales, administration, retail outlet, etc.)
Verify all the services you have found as billed to each location. It is important that you ask the user open ended questions that illicit an informative response and not a "yes or no" response. For example, "how many lines do you have at this location?" will give you more precise information for verifying lines and services than simply saying "do you have 5 lines at this location?".
Verify all the features you have found billed to the interviewed location. Ask the user about every feature that is being billed, how it is used and if it is needed. This verification process with the end user can turn up abuses of pay-per-use features such as call-return or repeat-dial. If abuse is present, it will most certainly be apparent during this line of questioning.
An estimate of in-bound and out-bound calling can be beneficial for determining the correct choice of local service options used at the location. Additionally, you may choose to ask the user about percentages of outbound local vs. long-distance calls made. This kind of information can assist you later in choosing correct local and long-distance plans to suit the needs of each specific location.
Percentage of time all lines are busy at one time helps identify obvious over provisioning. If a small percentage of lines are busy at one time, you can be fairly certain that over provisioning is present.
Hours of operation and number of staff is useful information for analyzing certain hypotheses such as long-distance options or alternate answering issues.
Surveys, whether conducted in person or over the phone, should be considered an integral part of any successful telecom audit. Get started today developing your telecom survey strategy!
About the Author
TelCon Associates, Inc. is a 32 yr. old telecom audit and bill management company specializing in helping companies reduce and manage telecom expense. For free guides on telecom cost-reduction, visit http://www.telconassociates.com
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