Call Accounting Featured Article

Call Accounting Tools Monitor Quality of Experience

  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Have you ever driven on a new highway, one that’s just been constructed? You marveled at the smooth surfaces, the wide four or five lanes, the modern-looking bridges and overpasses, and delighted in the thought that it would get you to your destination faster. That is, until you reached the part that was still under construction, and you were directed by traffic control to exit onto a 70-year-old two-lane back road full of pot holes and frost heaves.

“Digital transformation” is on everyone’s mind these days, and for good reason. Many companies are attempting to “go digital,” but they’re finding that even when they splash out big for automation and connectivity, there still remain bottlenecks and inefficiencies, whether they’re in the form of poorly (or non-) integrated solutions or manual tasks that simply haven’t been digitized or automated yet.

In a recent blog post, ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement’s Darlene Jackson wrote that many companies may not even fully understand where these roadblocks are.

“When applications are deployed in the workplace, it is usually with the idea of streamlining internal operations, but employees are only likely to use them when they work properly,” she wrote. “One reason that the most successful businesses see good outcomes with adoption is often because they use tools that allow IT to monitor quality of experience and troubleshoot user problems immediately.”

Monitoring the quality of experience of solutions and processes in the workplace is vital if companies are going to get the most out of their people and their technology investments. When it comes to business communications, monitoring for comprehensive user visibility could be as simple as robust unified communication reporting that gives an idea of what the quality of service (QoS) or quality of experience (QoE) metrics reveal about the endpoint activity in a company or work group.

Today, some call accounting solutions are specifically designed to monitor and report on business telephony solutions such as Skype (News - Alert) for Business.

“When using Skype for Business, for example, measuring adoption of video, IP telephony and Web conferencing as preferred methods of collaborating can determine whether those technologies should stay on,” wrote Jackson. “This can save on operational costs over time. Turning off unwanted technologies also improves employee productivity as it resolves issues with usage and lets workers use tools that work best for them. Since the bottom line is improving the customer experience, this should never be a problem for a forward-thinking company.”

Without the ability to monitor usage and report, a call accounting solution can’t help a company understand where user issues are arising, and these issues may be negatively affecting a number of processes – customer satisfaction and employee engagement chief among them. An easy way to keep an eye on communications traffic to look for small problems before they become large problems is critical for a company that wishes to achieve a full digital transformation when it comes to communications and networks.