What is Call Accounting?
November 11, 2014
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
The economic market is never short on communications tools, with everything from tablets to smartphones guiding our conversations, information gathering and even deal negotiations. Still, even with all of these tools at the ready, we rely on voice communications to help drive what we want to accomplish. The goal in effective communications is to know what tools to use within different channels to drive optimal effectiveness while also controlling costs, something call accounting helps to support.
At the very minimum, call accounting and reporting systems are designed to capture Call Detail Records from telephone systems to provide information on telecom costs, usage and employee activity. All telecom sources should be accessed for this information, including on-premise PBX (News - Alert) and VoIP servers, local and long distance carriers, hosted services, conference services and even wireless handsets.
The goal is to assess the organization’s entire voice network to understand activity overall. Company leaders gain the most benefit from solutions that offer customizable dashboards, an extensive menu of pre-defined reports, on-demand traffic analysis and a custom report designer. With access to this kind of information at the ready, decision makers are well informed before making any changes within the organization.
Plus, costs are accurately assigned throughout the organization. If one department is driving the bulk of the communications costs, such as the contact center, then that cost needs to be assigned appropriately. No division manager wants part of his or her budget reduced simply because the cost is too heavy for another. Accurate reporting helps to better associated those costs and build strategies around your internal activities.
Call accounting can also help you assess where there may be opportunities to provide more information through self-service channels. If your internal staff is taking a lot of calls to provide information customers could easily find on their own, this provides excellent insight into what you should include on your website, your social media channels and more. In doing so, you could effectively reduce the number of calls received and free up your employees to focus on revenue-generating activities.
The best business decisions are made when you have clear insight into the issues at hand. This is especially true when it comes to assigning costs within the organization. Call accounting helps you do this and so much more. With the information produced, you’ll be better equipped to make communication decisions moving forward. Whether you need an in-house system, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), mobile VoIP or any of the other available tools will be better determined with the information you gather through your call accounting platform.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi