Why Your Small Business Needs Call Accounting
June 10, 2015
By Susan J. Campbell
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Launching a new business can be scary and exciting at the same time. While you might be passionate about your new endeavor, you may wake up at night with fears of how you’ll pay the bills while still trying to get people excited about your concept enough to pay you. It’s the life of the entrepreneur and one reason why hosted unified communications (UC) solutions are gaining ground.
Keeping costs as low as possible without hurting opportunity is a primary focus for any startup or small business. Today, that means the adoption of cloud-based or hosted solutions. You have the opportunity to pay only the subscription rate and enjoy the benefits and capabilities of an enterprise-ready solution. When it integrates easily into your call accounting solution, you can demonstrate the areas of your business costing you the most in terms of communication, reconciling with the revenue potential that area represents.
So powerful is this information that the hosted UC market, according to Infonetics Research (News - Alert), is expected to increase to $12 billion by 2018. A Nextiva study suggests that the average revenue per user (ARPU) in hosted UC is $45 per month. If a vendor can add services like call reporting, call recording and even call accounting, that ARPU could increase by as much as 30 percent. Plus, adding such capabilities ensures the vendor can penetrate markets outside of the contact center arena, extending value to the small business or startup like yours.
If your focus is in offering hosted UC, the addition of these capabilities offers a profitable entry into new markets. Consider the importance of compliance outside of the contact center industry. The passing of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act implemented a number of difference compliance requirements in a variety of industries, especially financial services. Plus, the ability to record calls and capture information in call accounting for billing purposes makes the solution even more valuable to the small business user.
Such insight into communications delivers considerable value to the small business. It allows for better decision making, changes on the fly and the allocation of resources according to performance. The insight achieved through a proven call accounting solution, tied to call reporting and call recording, allows the business to gain insight into the customer base and the industry. This data then leads to a competitive advantage that can easily drive growth.
Regardless of the industry in which you compete, gleaning valuable information from all interactions allows you to make better decisions than the competition. Given that kind of power, why haven’t you put a proven call accounting solution in place?