Are call centers safe against Identity Theft?

Do you know what an Identity Theft is? It is a case of someone else pretends to be you, use services in your name, make changes in your account, and even cause you pay for their use of the services.

So now you know about identity theft.

You heard that it is risky to shop online. You decide to be on the safe side and use the telephone to conduct your business, calling call centers for you business.
Well, you'll be surprised to learn that it is not less risky.

In an eye opener article, Martin Warwick for telecomtv.com discuss a survey of the UK's call center managers that shows that most of the call centers' agents fail to comply to security instructions, and thus expose their customer to identity theft.
To read more, see http://tinyurl.com/yzgwnyt

The Enigmatic Telephone Bill (4) - What is a Step discount?

In my series of posts on the Enigmatic Telephone Bill I am talking about the complexity of price plans and services, explaining various discounts that are used by telephone companies and showing how easy it is for the telephone companies to miscalculate your bill.
In a previous post, I talked about a Tier discount rate plan.
This post is about Step Discount. This type of discount is an additional type of Volume Discount, which is based on the volume of your usage.

Step Discount divides your usage into steps of volume, and gives you different rate for each step. Usually the first step has the highest rate, and you pay less as your usage grows.

Let me give you an example of text messages step rate plan:
The first 10 messages are for $0.5 a message
Messages 11 to 30 are $0.4 each
Messages 31 to 100 are $0.3 each
Messages 100 and up are $0.2 each
This rate plan is fairly simple.
If you sent 25 messages, you expect your messages charge to be $11.
10 X 0.5 = 5
15 X 0.4 = 6
In some cases the bill shows you your messages divided by the steps. In other cases, you get one line for your text messages, with the total amount.

Step discount for calls is more complicated to check, because in one call you may cross steps, and thus one minute has one rate and the next minute has a different rate.

I hope this post is of use to you, when you negotiate with you service provider.

Do you use Twitter?

I am new to Twitter, and still not used to the amount of tweets you see there. It is so hard to find a tweet that is meaningful to you.
In a research that was done recently, my impression was substenshiated: 40 per cent of messages on Twitter are "pointless babble".
Read more at http://tinyurl.com/ltsdyn.

Telephony service: Pre-Paid vs. Post-paid

There are 2 very distinct ways for Telecom services to be delivered: One by which you buy bulk of services and pay up front – "Pre-Paid Service", and the other, by which you subscribe to services, and pay after you used them – "Post-Paid Service".

Post-paid services are delivered where the payment ethics are good, and most of the customers have bank accounts and credit cards.
With Telecoms that offer post paid service, you are requested to have a Direct Debit order to your bank account, or to give your credit card number.
Each Bill is then presented to the bank or credit card company for payment, and the bills of these customers are "assumed paid".
Post-paid services may cause great headache to the operators, when customers cancel their direct debit order, or their credit card is no longer active, or they get payment slips and don't pay them.
In every Telecom that offer Post-paid service one finds a Collections department, whose job is to chase the unpaid bills.

I will discuss Collections in the future.

With pre-paid services, the customer pays up front a sum of money which enables usage of services. It can be only voice service, or a mixture of voice, text and internet.
Each time the customer uses the services, the balance is recalculated.
For each service, there is minimum balance which allows usage. Once this minimum is reached, the service is denied and the customer is requested to add money to the balance.
With pre-paid services, Telecom operators do not need to deal with unpaid bills.

If you, the customer, get to choose, what would you prefer: Post-paid service of Pre-paid?
Telecom operators offer better rates for post-paid services, because they know who you are. They have your bank account / credit card number, they have your address, they have your ID number, they can analyze your usage. In many cases you are their customer for a long time.

So, if I would like better offers, and I do have bank account / credit card, and I don't mind my operator having all that knowledge about me, I would go for Post-paid service.
But if I don't have a bank account / credit card, or I want to stay anonymous to the operator, I'd go for the pre-paid service.

Who is your service provider?

Once upon a time, there were very few telephony service providers.
You got your service from and you were loyal to the one operator you knew.
In recent years, the name of the game is Mergers & Acquisitions.
You can no longer be loyal to your service provider because they are no longer loyal to you.
Just recently I read an a article about T-Mobile UK which is "for sale", and it really reminds me of the children's game Monopoly... http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=45178&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10

The Enigmatic Telephone Bill (3) - What is a Tier discount?

In my series of posts on the Enigmatic Telephone Bill I am talking about the complexity of price plans and services, explaining various discounts that are used by telephone companies and showing how easy it is for the telephone companies to miscalculate your bill.

In My previous post, I talked about a Tier discount rate plan I have.
This post is about Tier Discount. This type of discount is a type of Volume Discount, which is based on the volume of your usage.

Here is how it works:
If you talk up to 100 minutes a month, your rate, let's say is 0.4$ a minute.
If you talk more than 100 minutes, but up to 200, your rate is 0.35$ a minute.
If you talk more than 200 minutes, but up to 400, your rate is 0.28$ a minute.
If you talk more than 400 minutes, your rate is 0.25$ a minute.
This type of discount "encourages" you to talk more.

When the monthly bill is calculated, the Billing system collects all the relevant calls.
In many cases not all the calls are included in this discount.
For example, if you have a family & friends plan, the calls in this plan may not be included in the Tier discount.
Then the total minutes of the relevant calls is calculated against the tiers.
If you follow your bill during the month, you see the calls rated with the basic rate which does not show the Tier discount.

I hope this is helpful.

On top of Your Telephone Bill, You have to pay for paying it....

In a very interesting article, from TelecomTV, http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=45261&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10#, you can see that telephone companies never cease to surprise us, regarding charges they put on us.

The Enigmatic Telephone Bill (2)

In my series of posts on the Enigmatic Telephone Bill I am talking about the complexity of price plans and services, explaining various discounts that are used by telephone companies and showing how easy it is for the telephone companies to miscalculate your bill.

In this post, I will share with you my telephone bill.

Actually I get 5 telephone bills! One bill from my cellular provider, one from my internet provider, one from my international calling provider and 2 from my land line provider – one for each line. You probably would suggest to me to have my bills on line, or via e-mail, but I am an old school woman, who, for accounting purposes prefers to have her expenses documented on paper.

So, I will pick my cellphone bill, mainly because EVERYODY has a cell phone (at least all my followers….).
For my cellular provider, I am one customer with one account and 5 subscribers. I get one monthly bill for all my subscribers. Luckily for the operator, I pay my subscribers in full. Sometimes there is a split charge, when the subscriber pays part of the total. I will discuss Split Charge in the future.

There are 3 different rate plans for my subscribers.
One is very simple and straight forward. Unfortunately, the rate per minute is the highest of all 3. In this rate plan, the subscriber is charged a fix monthly charge, and then a fix rate per minute.

In the second rate plan, there is a monthly charge, which is deducted from the usage charge. In addition, I defined 10 numbers within the operator network, for which, each 2 minutes are considered as 1 minute for charging purposes. Actually, when I signed for this rate plan, I was told that for these 10 numbers I get 50% discount, which apparently is not the case.
This rate plan is considered Tier discount. Depending on the total monthly usage (total minutes), the rate per minute is set. The more you talk, the less you pay (per minute). Now, because the calculation for my preferred 10 numbers is as explained above, I reach a lower tier.
The bill shows you the rate per minute you are charged. Unfortunately, the operator updates these tiers once in a while, and it is difficult to keep track.

The third rate plan is the most complicated of the 3. Different rates for week days and weekend days. Free text messages at night. Content services with fix and/or per usage charges, 10 preferred numbers with discount, etc.

Confused? I am! And I designed Telephone Bills, I developed and implemented Billing systems, I conducted investigation into Billing systems as a result of customer complaints.

In my next posts I will discuss Rating issues, over and under charging, discounts and other Billing concepts.

Stay tuned!

Rumors of the death of fixed voice telephony greatly exaggerated

Do you think that Cell Phones just killed the Fix Line Telephony?
Well, think again.
Attached is a link of a very interesting post on the subject, by Martyn Warwick, published on TelecomTV.
http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=45179&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10
Enjoy.

The Enigmatic Telephone Bill

You get it once a month, maybe once in two months. Maybe you don't get it at all and go online to read it.
Isn't it like a riddle? Don't you look at it and try to figure out what does it mean?
You try to correlate the figures you see to the promises you heard from the sales person a while ago.
You try to figure out how much a minute of call costs you. How much for incoming call, how much for outgoing calls, how much in - network, how much out of network, how much for roaming. Wow! How complicated it is.
I am going to discuss the Telephone Bill in my next few posts. Keep following.
You are welcome to send to me your telephone bill and I will use it as example.