Call Accounting: Just How Much Information Do You Need to Collect?
May 11, 2016
By Stefania Viscusi
Assignment Desk, Content Management
Call accounting is a term that relates to the collection and analysis of telecom usage by businesses to ensure they are in budget and employees are using the tools provided to them properly.
The telecommunications software or hardware application can document telephone usage and do things like record, capture and assign costs of all telephone usage for both small businesses or large enterprises.
Not only to control spend and balance budgets, call accounting can also be a means for uncovering improper usage or opportunities for better training.
The opportunities for better training and performance improvements from collected data are quickly becoming as valuable to managers as are cost savings.
This is because sophisticated data - things like ring and talk times, as well as hold and transfer times, help managers to see where there are possible holes in training or where performance improvements can be made – further improving the bottom line.
An article by by Rito Salomone of Resource Software International (News - Alert) Ltd. (RSI) discusses the importance of this ‘Cradle to the Grave’ style of reporting when it comes to telecom communications.
Things like studying call history logs and call recordings offer an opportunity for managers to verify interactions are meeting corporate service level standards and uncover customer complaints as well as fine tune corporate policies where needed. It can also help them to figure out more efficient scheduling of agents based on their skills and call volumes.
One thing we don’t readily think about which Salomone comments on, is that this data can also help those who have an on premises solution to find out where possible failures in the system or bottlenecks are happening and need to be fixed.
Regardless of the industry, with the right solution in place, and managers diligently monitoring the data provided, businesses can have a leg up on the competition in today’s fiercely competitive market.
Edited by Maurice Nagle