Call Accounting Featured Article

How Schools Can Benefit from Call Accounting

  By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, TMC

Things are constantly changing at schools. Curriculums and frameworks are frequently retooled. Budgets are always under the microscope. A good portion of the students graduates every year. Students and teachers may opt to learn or teach at other institutions for a while. And sometimes administrators, students, teachers, and other university staff simply move on entirely.

That means the students, teachers, administrators, and others who occupy the hallowed halls are at least a little different every year, quarter, or semester.

Schools keep track of these individuals by collecting and keeping human resource records, student records, transfer slips, and transcripts. But how do these moves, adds, and changes impact universities’ telecom strategies?

The fact is that these variable factors are seldom part of the equation.

But they should be. Because when organizations like universities fail to take into consideration the fluidity of their populations and how that impacts their telecom inventories and spends, they welcome inefficiency and waste valuable resources.

That’s why educational institutions should consider implementing solutions like ISI’s (News - Alert) Telecom Audit service, the company says. Telecom Profit Optimizer enables schools to easily assess their telecommunications expenses and services, and get an analysis offering areas for potential cost savings.

There’s no upfront fee for this service. Instead, ISI gets a percentage of the savings it provides. And, as ISI explains, there are typically plenty of opportunities for savings at educational institutions.

“When specific processes are not in place to activate and deactivate phone lines, or when organizations don't have a properly-documented inventory, the telecom spend could be hemorrhaging money without even knowing there’s a hole,” ISI says. “Landlines are assigned to desks, but not reported or disconnected when the employee moves on. Cell phones are often distributed without written justification for employee use. Carrier bills go unreconciled, and inventory records are haphazard and nonexistent with regards to phones or devices dispensed to employees, and with multiple departments with which to allocate costs, this can become highly troublesome.”

ISI also offers Infortel Invoice Manager. It helps universities inventory the devices they distribute, and the services they use, and where.

And it provides Infortel Wireless Manager. This solution allows organizations such as universities to more easily track and manage the wireless devices and plans they provide employees.

It continually checks to make sure these individuals are on the most efficient cellular plans based on their usage and requirements. And it flags abnormal usage, can identify when a device or service is not being used and needs to be decommissioned, and provides the organization with a single invoice.

ISI Telemanagement Solutions (News - Alert) also provides a recording solution that schools can employ to make better use of teacher time. This is important because, as in so many professions today, teacher time is at a premium.

Enabling teachers to easily record and share class makeup and study sessions lets teachers eliminate some of their repetitive work, allows students to access these resources on demand as their schedules allow, and gives the teachers more time to focus on other pursuits.

ISI leverages Verba’s Voice and Immersive Video Recording system to allow for all that. This solution captures immersive video and voice, as well as screen images. It includes full recording, on-demand recording, and selective recording options. And it works with all major contact center and unified communication vendor solutions, including those from Avaya, Broadsoft, Cisco, and Microsoft (News - Alert).