Communication facilities are the lifeline of most successful
businesses and often the most difficult to manage. The success
of any organization is directly related to its ability to
address the changing needs of its people and customers.
Management of telephone charges, equipment fees, VoIP traffic,
internet usage, and provider discounts is a difficult task. Most
communication managers demand the necessary tools to allow
administrators to monitor, evaluate, forecast and allocate
communications management services and expenses.
Communications facilities are continuing to evolve at a rapid
rate. Call accounting is generally the centerpiece of a complete
communication management solution (CMS) to allow customers to
track, process and allocate communications transactions (analog,
VoIP and data).
Communications transactions are generally delivered to call
accounting systems where this information is processed
real-time, summarized or submitted to a central server for
multi-site consolidation.
For many years, long distance traffic was monopolized by the
major telephone companies. Today, the complex and competitive
sphere of alternate services, long distance carriers and
countless discount strategies leaves most customers baffled
about best available savings. A robust call accounting system
will provide a concise unbiased picture of comparative rate
structures using concrete historical data.
Customer relationship management is fundamental to the success
of many organizations. CMS utilizes calling line information
delivered the telephone system for comprehensive inbound traffic
analysis. These reports assist in designing regional campaigns,
network planning and call center staffing.
Network performance is critical in a call center, emergency
dispatch service, hospitality, government or even a small
business. Call accounting produces statistics for trunk usage,
grade of service, all trunks busy and peak/busy hour analysis.
Call accounting pinpoints over or under capacity environments.
Many organizations struggle with workforce management and
productivity. Shadow CMS provides exception management reports
to Nortel customers, which highlight long duration, excessive
cost and misdialed calls. Each call may be pinpointed to a
particular password, account code, extension or authorization
number. Call accounting provides detailed telephone charges
reports, which highlight usage practices
Professional services firms often face the tedious task of
allocating communications expenses to customer account files.
Call accounting delivers expense account code, password or
authorization code reports. These results can be automatically
directed to accounting systems, spreadsheets, HTML, email and a
variety of other formats.
In hospitality environments, information is processed in real
time, assigned a cost and immediately delivered to property
management room folios for true billing integration.
A robust call accounting system provides a series of
sophisticated traffic analysis reports (that utilize CCS, Erlang
and Erlang B) to determine network efficiency and alternate cost
modeling for facility planning. In retail and direct customer
service environments, a call accounting system should extendsits
communications analysis to custom call routing (CCR), voice mail
and interactive voice recognition reporting (IVR). This paints a
total picture of communication activity,
About the author:
Rito Salomone is the president of Resource Software
International Ltd. (RSI). He has 17 years experience in the
field of communication management solutions.
For more information you can review:
http://www.telecost.com or
contact the author at rsalomone@telecost.com.
