How Fraud Protection Helps Resellers Create Competitive Advantage

Guest Blog by Carl Boraman, Director of Strategic Alliances, Tollring

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Published: November 8, 2019

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Telecoms fraud is a growing problem, with costs in excess of £25.5bn per year – more than twice that of credit card fraud. For the crowded marketplace that is hosted UC, this means that resellers often need to guarantee their customers protection from the financial risk of call fraud to be able to compete. However, many hosted UC service providers only credit/spend cap resellers’ exposure to fraud, leaving those resellers in the dark, with a relatively small part to play in protecting their customers.

While this may mean the service provider bears most of the financial cost of fraud, this approach is less than ideal. In this spend cap model, resellers quite often still bear costs that many believe that the service provider should cover as they are the ones with the data and tools to prevent and protect. Furthermore, the unpredictable charges that often come with fraud incidents could actually pose cash flow issues for smaller resellers, and can even negate the margins accrued over time from their hosted solution.

Whilst reliance on spend capping can reduce financial risk, however, the disruption and reputational loss caused by cutting off a customer’s account without warning, with time taken to re-establish the service, often results in anger, frustration, destroyed trust, costly disputes and, ultimately, the customer running to the competition!

However, emerging fraud protection solutions remove the reliance on simple spend capping by leveraging AI and automating prevention processes, and by using machine learning to predict and block attacks intelligently in real time.  For example, Tollring is taking major steps to not just reduce fraud in cloud telephony, but to eliminate it, completely.  Our innovative fraud and credit management solution seamlessly integrates with leading hosted voice and SIP trunking platforms, delivering automated real-time monitoring and alerts with predictive analysis of trends and the unique capability to instantly stop a fraud attack and prevent further attacks without the need for human intervention, to protect against fraud attacks without impacting legitimate business. This is paying dividends for service providers and their resellers, with over £125 million in fraud costs avoided over the last year.

Fraud protection as a competitive advantage

Spend capping is a common yet incomplete solution to a constantly moving problem. By instead selecting a solution that both tackles the challenges of financial and reputational risk, resellers can quickly gain a competitive advantage and build solid, long-lasting customer relationships based on trust.

Choose a solution with a proven high rate of success over time

The fraud landscape is constantly evolving. Routes, destinations and numbers change constantly, and the methods used are becoming more varied and sophisticated – for example, ‘pick pocket’ style approaches that fly under the radar unless AI-driven processes are in place. In order to actively prevent attacks, you need confidence that your service provider can keep up with these dynamics. Your SP should be able to share with you what attacks have happened on your customers and the methods used to help educate, protect and prevent future attacks.

Customisation is key

Businesses vary hugely in how they use their phone systems and trunks. Even within the same industry, the calling patterns that appear fraudulent to some could well match up with legitimate behaviour for another. Simply by looking at previous bills and call reporting software, resellers can gain a strong advantage by understanding how a business uses their phone system and, provided that the fraud prevention education and technology that they use allows them to adapt and customise rules, this will allow them to deliver a personalised approach to each customer and greatly reduce the risk of business disruption and unnecessary cost.

Visibility delivers understanding and control

By choosing a service provider that works in a close partnership with its resellers to help protect its customers and who shares with its resellers background information and advice on fraud types and methods, can build their own fraud-protected customer propositions that they can tailor for customers as required, again reducing risk of disruption to everyday business activities and potentially significant cost. This also allows resellers to gain a greater understanding of the fraud landscape, makes it much easier to demonstrate value to the end customer, and build value into their customer proposition

Provide a comprehensive experience with credit management

Intelligent credit management tools provide resellers with the protection they need to reduce service pain points. This means that it’s become much easier to prevent bill shock, bad debt and churn of unhappy customers, all of which increase business overheads.

Credit management is the perfect partner to fraud protection, putting end customers in control of their communications costs.

Make security and protection from fraudsters central to your customer offering, not an afterthought

The trust and loyalty fostered by resellers that offer reliable and secure solutions is hard to replicate. By making this a key brand element, it sends a message that extends far beyond the practicalities of fraud protection.

It is important to ensure that any PBX or hosted phone system that is under your control is truly secure too. Strong passwords, smart user management and continuous staff and customer training all contribute to preventing and stopping fraud completely. In addition, ensuring that your service provider offers fraud prevention across SIP trunks and hosted UC for full coverage across your services is key.


Guest Blog by Carl Boraman, Director of Strategic Alliances, Tollring
Tollring is a market leading software developer providing data visualisation and business intelligence tools that help manage, understand and control a wide array of communications information, resources and assets. With offices in the UK, the USA, India and Australia, Tollring specialises in business communications analyticscall recording solutionstelecoms expense management and fraud detection.  Our innovative solutions are developed in-house and distributed via an extensive global channel partner network. Year on year growth at Tollring means our business is continually evolving, but our core values remain the same: teamwork, integrity, energy and performance.

 

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