Call Accounting Featured Article

Phone Numbers are a Powerful Tool and Business Differentiator

  By Laura Stotler, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Forget about the phone – 2017 may well prove to be the year of the phone number. Smartphones are pretty much ubiquitous these days and have worked their way into the enterprise, thanks to a push from workers and businesses alike for BYOD and more flexible and collaborative approaches to communication. As such, the phone number is transforming into much more than just a string of digits for making a call, becoming a personal identification tool and an integral part of today’s enterprise communication systems.

As phone numbers become increasingly tied to identification, they provide added value to the enterprise. A phone number offers a rich cache of data about caller preferences and history and may be used to properly route calls to the appropriate person or location. This type of information is essential in the age of omni-channel customer services, when callers don’t want to have to wade through tedious IVR menus to be connected to the proper channel to meet their needs.

And on the outgoing end, phone numbers may be tied to specific marketing and advertising campaigns and then used to measure the results from each medium and provide deeper understanding of customers’ needs. As a critical component of business operations, phone numbers are also essential for appropriate call accounting and management practices, offering insight and metrics to ensure billing and provisioning processes stay on track and run as efficiently as possible.

In addition to the valuable data and metrics they provide, phone numbers are essentially transforming the enterprise phone system. As businesses look at replacing or upgrading their communication systems, they are re-thinking the necessity of investing in traditional landline desk phones. Legacy phone systems simply don’t make sense in today’s mobile, geographically dispersed world, particularly if a decent chunk of workers will be communicating remotely.

From a call accounting perspective as well, yesterday’s legacy phone systems are expensive and cumbersome, requiring service contracts, maintenance and banks of phone numbers that may simply not get any use. Migrating to a more flexible cloud or IP-based phone system that enables workers to use one phone number wherever they happen to be located is a much more cost effective and agile option, not to mention the boosts in productivity and collaboration that will result.

2017 promises to be an exciting and transformative year on the technology front, and changes in enterprise communications will play a significant role. The increasing value of the phone number and the important data it provides are indicative of the exciting shift happening in the call accounting and management and overall communications spaces.