ISVM Tales

The SMDR

C-Tech’s Integrated Systems: Voice & Messaging course (ISVM) offers The Next Step to those with copper skills.  The course covers programming a telephone switch and a voice mail switch with plenty of hands-on activities. Students can learn valuable skills, have fun, and earn an industry-recognized certification as well. One feature that sparks a lot of interest is the SMDR.

SMDR stands for Station Message Detail Report.  It’s the swami of the telephone switch—it sees all and knows all (and remembers all).  Every call that enters or leaves the switch is noted by the SMDR.  It logs the time the call was made, where it came from, its destination, and how long it took.  You can access the SMDR through an RJ45 jack in the switch and download this data to a printer or laptop and get a complete picture of what your switch has been up to.

Why would you want to do this?

Telephone calls cost money.  The SMDR can give you information about how your phone system is being used that you won’t find on your phone bill.  You can track phone usage by department in your business for budgetary purposes.  If you’ve got a customer service or hotline department, you can learn when the busy and slack times of day are, and schedule lunch breaks accordingly.

The SMDR can also point up unauthorized use of the phones.  We know a company that was being billed for frequent calls to Puerto Rico—up to $300 per month—that no one could explain.  A check of the SMDR showed that these calls were taking place at 3:00 in the morning. The only one in the building then was the night watchman.  He’d been making calls to his relatives there.

If you’ve ever made a phone call from a hotel room, you know that you’ll pay dearly for it at check-out time.  You have the hotel’s SMDR to thank for that little item on your bill.  Hotels and motels rely heavily on their SMDR’s as a source of revenue. In fact, in 1992, a major US hotel chain actually made more money charging for phone calls than they did renting out rooms.

To find out more about the swami of the telephone switch, consider taking C-Tech’s course, Integrated Systems: Voice & Messaging.  To learn more about ISVM, contact meganc@c-techtraining.com.