Call Accounting Featured Article

The Value of Call Accounting and Reporting Solutions

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

Trim the fat. Sweat your assets. Increase productivity.

Businesses are always looking for how to get more out of their investments while decreasing spend. Call accounting and reporting can be a great way to do that.

Call accounting and reporting solutions capture call detail records from communications systems. Those systems may include anything from a hosted service to an on-premises PBX (News - Alert) to a conferencing service. These solutions use CDRs to create reports on employee activity, and telecom costs and usage.

As a result, organizations can see what departments and individuals are using which services and when. That means they can more easily spot abuse and misuse of communications and collaboration services and solutions. So they can take steps to eliminate abuse and offer guidance on how to better use them.

Call accounting and reporting can also identify unused and under used extensions. It can do traffic and trunk analysis, so organizations can contract for only the connections they need – and lower their costs in the process.

And call accounting software, and audit services, can help to identify and eliminate excess, incorrect, or unnecessary carrier billing. That can lower an organization’s costs going forward. And analysis of past carrier bills may turn up issues that businesses can bring to their carriers’ attention to get future credits.

As a business owner or manager, you may think that such mistakes or oversights are just a drop in the bucket and not worth your time. But you may be surprised at how frequently carrier overbilling occurs, and how much you have to gain through call accounting and reporting.

For instance, last year around this time the Federal Trade Commission ordered AT&T to refund $88 million to customers who were charged up to $.9.99 a month for premium text message services without their consent. More than 2 million AT&T (News - Alert) customers received bill credits as a result.