How Call Accounting Can Help Educational Institutions Optimize Communications
June 17, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Capturing call activity is a challenge for any organization if they don’t have the proper tools like call accounting in place. Interestingly enough, the organization may pay attention to how much they pay for their monthly phone bills, but don’t dig in deep enough to know for sure if they have phones on the account that they don’t use, departments misusing their connections or errors that continue to drive the cost up over time.
In the education sector, keeping costs down is a primary concern. At the same time, educational institutions need to incorporate the latest technologies to offer opportunities beyond the classroom setting. In doing so, they place extra stress on connectivity and bandwidth. It doesn’t help when mobile devices and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies must be accounted for in the overall communications plan. It may actually require an overhaul of the telecom infrastructure.
According to an ISI (News - Alert) blog post, one college had to do just that, modernizing their equipment and updating the wireless network. With strained systems, a VoIP platform showing wear and little protection in terms of disaster recovery and redundancy, anything that took down the phone lines on campus would also take down communications at its two satellite campuses. Change needed to take place and it needed to be implemented in multiple facets so that IT could create a solid ROI strategy and justify the update to Cisco’s Unified Communications (News - Alert) system.
The main argument for the change was that if an update wasn’t initiated quickly, students and staff would suffer. Quality of service was projected to continue to decline, which would impact productivity for staff and student enrollment. With a migration, the college would also allow for future scalability to accommodate desired growth. Plus, the Cisco (News - Alert) platform could be customized to accommodate this growth and provide the backbone the college needed for the long-term.
When an organization is considering a migration to a new system, the main focus always has to be on meeting needs. Call accounting can help in the process of assessing those needs and measuring where activity is taking place. It also allows the organization to determine where needs are being met, abused or ignored. Using that information to form a plan for migration can then lead to the desired outcomes.
In the education space, knowing where communications demands are not being met, where the infrastructure can’t handle demand or where devices and lines are lying dormant can all contribute to the more efficient use of available systems. The key is in call accounting to help gather that information for the desired ROI.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi