Why Call Accounting Matters in a Mobile Environment
October 21, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
What tools have you used to support call accounting and telecom expense management (TEM) in your organization? Whether you automated these processes or spent time going through invoices line-by-line, both elements have likely been present in your environment for some time. The good news is you don’t have to take the manual route as TEM solutions are gaining momentum.
A Apps Tech News post recently explored this topic, highlighting that Ovum (News - Alert) recently ranked TEM as one of its six key factors for enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions. The topic has also made an appearance in the courtroom as California has ruled that employees need to be reimbursed for work-related calls made on their personal phones.
Still, TEM is in its infancy, making its presence known along with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies. Companies can’t simply dump work calls on their employees – at least not in the state of California. So if BYOD is going to be embraced, TEM has to be in place to know what can be charged back to the organization and what is a personal call, app or basic usage.
At the same time, TEM and call accounting can help in terms of analytics. Assessments of employee performance are challenging when the employee is working remotely most of the time. If managers know how much time is being spent in Salesforce, for instance, they can assign costs to different areas and activities. This allows for correlations to be made, assessing who is performing according to expectations and who is not.
These are important factors for properly managing the employee who is working mobile. While a trust factor is always involved, there has to be some level of accountability as well. From a company perspective, you also need to know where to charge certain expenses. If all of this information is captured and managed within the same platform, the snapshots created save a lot of time in mining the data so you can focus on driving business processes.
Take into consideration the major shift away from the BlackBerry (News - Alert). Companies just like yours were frustrated with the amount of expense on this particular line item and the introduction of other smartphones allowed for an exploration of other strategies. What many learned, however, was that employees were using their BlackBerry to access data, email and other applications – something that needed to be preserved when shifting to a BYOD or other mobile policy.
In doing so, accountability and control still need to be in place. This means allowing users access to the same applications they need to do their jobs and managing this time accordingly. When expectations are understood and TEM and call accounting are put in place to automate the oversight, all those involved can focus on business goals and not the cost of a phone call.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi