Telkom SA has been making waves in the area of customer care through its innovative use of Neural Technologies (Nt) fraud management system, Minotaur™.
The South African operator received an award for its "ISP Short Call Project" which was carried out to alert its customers to unnecessary telephone charges.
Telkom had been experiencing problems with customers configuring their modems for 128 KB when they only had a 64 KB service. This was causing their computers to launch constant short calls to try to establish the second link which was required for the other 64 KB. These calls were constantly rejected by their ISP, causing the customer to be charged for multiple short calls. These calls were constantly rejected by their ISP, causing the customer to be charged for multiple short calls. Minotaur™ was used to identify the clients and pass the tickets to special groups who called the customers and alerted them to the problem.
Minotaur™ was installed at Telkom SA in October 2000. The solution has been particularly successful in assisting Telkom manage one of its most prevalent fraud types, 'clip on' fraud. However, since Minotaur's™ installation Telkom has come up with more and more innovative ways of using the system, particularly in the areas of customer care.
For example, Nt worked with Telkom to design the EDR Classifier, a visualisation tool that makes it possible for analysts to quickly identify individual fraud CDRs from within an archive of thousands. This enabled Telkom to remove fraudulent call charges from customers' bills (see articles Improving customer relations and minimising revenue loss and Neural Technologies helps improve Telkom's customer relations).
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