Advantages of Call Accounting Stretch beyond Saving Money

Mark D. McNeill, director of marketing at call accounting company ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement Solutions, has written a study noting that “any business that has used a Telecom Management System, or ‘call accounting,’ knows that it was very useful in the costing of phone calls.”

This is because, as you can imagine, the idea of call accounting is that “instantly knowing the cost of a call or when calls were being made to certain phone numbers, like 411 or international locations, helped Telecom Managers spot problem areas, eliminate waste and reduce their costs.”

Earlier this year Technology Marketing Corporation’s INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine honored ISI Telemanagement Solutions’ telecom expense management, or TEM, Infortel Select, with 2009 TEM Excellence award.

Call accounting is also affected by the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks, since, as McNeill correctly notes, “the cost of a particular phone call may not be important. After all, most businesses using some kind of a VoIP phone service are paying a flat rate. The cost of an individual phone call doesn’t matter.”

This doesn’t mean companies don’t still need to practice efffective call accounting. Telecom Management Systems “can help you allocate network costs back to employees or departments, and some businesses use Telecom Management Systems to bill their clients for phone costs,” but there’s much more to call accounting than that:

“If that’s all you are using Telecom Management [call accounting] for, you are missing out on a wealth of information that could help you run your business more efficiently and increase your revenues,” McNeill says.

Among the reasons he gives:

Call accounting systems provide businesses with a real-time, ground-level view of communications going on within their organizations.

White collar productivity. A simple report from your Telecom Management System will show you the number of calls, talk time and numbers called for every employee in your organization. You’ll quickly spot employees talking on the phone with family or friends and be able to focus them back on the business task at hand.

The customer. Consider your “informal” customer contact centers? Your Billing Department? The phone at the Reception Desk? Your Accounting Department? One of your stores? They all receive customer calls every day. What happens to those calls? Who is tracking them? Again, having a Telecom Management System in place can help you monitor these informal customer contact centers and identify issues before they become major problems that cost you sales.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Juliana Kenny