Call Accounting Can Simplify Complex Telecom Tracking
November 26, 2014
By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor
Telecom expense management has never been easy for the enterprise—or easy for anyone, for that matter. But it can be especially challenging for large organizations with many lines, different plans, and varying service needs depending on the employee. It is challenging to get a good grip on actual calling needs and where abuse or overages are taking place.
A fair amount of this is due to the way that telecom providers bill.
“Carriers often require customers to use a summary version of the paper bill for payments,” noted a recent ISI Telemanagement blog post. “The total amount due on electronic bills rarely matches paper bills. Differences between paper and electronic bills are more than just rounding errors. All versions of the bill should contain the same level of detail, and be equally reliable for audit back to contractual rates and terms and bill payment.”
It also doesn’t help that telecom providers use value added networks (VAN) for transmission of Electric Data Interchange (EDI) bills rather than Applicability Statement 2 (AS2), which can boost clarity.
Beyond these two areas where there can be improvement, though, an even larger issue is the actual billing process. Unlike residential customers, most businesses don’t receive a single bill each month that lists all costs and services.
Businesses don’t have to put up with this complexity and opacity in their telecom spend, however; a good call accounting solution such as ISI’s (News - Alert) Infortel Select 10 can keep track of actual telecom use, and also detect employee telecom abuse and cost allocations, among other benefits.
Infortel Select, for instance, can identify busy hours and how many trunks were used during those hours. It can analyze usage across the entire enterprise no matter the carrier or the platform, and it can deliver usage reporting even when the telecom provider is slow in generating one or delivers only summary data.
In the case of monitoring telecom abuse, a good call accounting solution also can be set to deliver customized alarms when appropriate telecom use is exceeded. This can enable an enterprise not only to adjust reactively, but also stop abuse as it is happening.
Business is increasingly complex. But telecom bills should not be among that complexity.