One of the most important facets of business telephone systems is call accounting, yet it often goes unnoticed in smaller business models. Call accounting provides your business with the analytics data it needs to improve business communications on a business-wide scale. All business owners should consider this a vital part of their systems.
Used correctly, call accounting can help you prevent communication abuses by employees in your company, and it can lead to a reduction in costs across many of the core types of communication that your business uses on a regular basis.
What Is Call Accounting?
Call accounting is a useful software program that gathers and records all of your telephone usage. It should be part of a unified communications infrastructure as a method of tracking behaviors and changing them to suit the needs of the business.
Call accounting usually provides the user with a historical record of all incoming, outgoing, and internal calls. Depending on the program, it can have many other features that are useful for analytics measurement as well, such as call costing, alarms, and billing applications.
The entire system works by tapping into your telephonic data directly from your communication systems. It then translates this bulk information into something you can use as a business owner. These are called ‘insights.’ You can use these analytics insights to alter the policies in your business or change the behavior of your staff.
If people have been calling too much, you can reduce the amount of time that each staff member is allowed to remain on the phone. If a certain method of calling clients is working like a charm, that can be implemented company-wide.
Your PBX or telephone system creates things called ‘call detail records’ for every call that is received. This information is then stored in a server and processed by the software. The goals of call accounting are to calculate the cost of telephone calls and to allocate the cost to particular users.
You will gain new insights into your telephonic communications so that you can measure and track employee performance, and improve communications overall. It is a very valuable way to consistently improve your business telephone system practices.
Benefits of Accurate Call Accounting
Call accounting has some very powerful benefits for your company. Saving money on telecommunication expenses is key to a successful business model, and this means you will need to track and understand your company’s usage. When you have accurate call accounting on your side, you will not have to worry about keeping things in check.
- Optimize your rates: With call accounting, you can aggregate call expenses by type and carrier, which means that you can negotiate better rates with certain service providers. You can also institute new policies to help manage usage.
- Accurate cost allocation: Perhaps the most important use for call accounting is to accurately allocate telephone expenses to the right department or employee. This helps when you’re evaluating human performance as you can see who has spent the most on calls.
- Reduced management time: Call accounting replaces manual tracking of telephone usage, which is an arduous process and difficult to get right without software to help you. With the right software, however, you can spend your time making decisions instead of trying to work out who did what when.
- Network and resource optimization: Call accounting can help your business identify a wide range of improvements that are needed—such as data delivery capacity and call routing efficiency. Using this data, you can streamline every physical process.
- Educational tools: Because call accounting software produces useable reports, you can use them as educational tools to help managers in your company come up with better solutions for staff behavior or discipline.
- Support available 24/7: When you get accurate call accounting software from the same provider that setup your unified communications infrastructure, you get round the clock support. Installation, setup, and fixes are available 24/7.
- Improves employee production: Eliminate unnecessary calling and make your employees accountable for their telephone usage while at work. Fewer calls mean lighter bills at the end of the month.
- Contain costs: Above all, call accounting serves to contain the telephonic costs of your business. It is incredible how much money can be wasted on calls if they are left unmonitored. Make sure that you always know how your communication systems are being used by your staff.
Call accounting is beneficial to everyone. It helps business owners set better policy regarding telephone usage, and it decreases monthly call costs. For employees, it helps regulate how much time they spend on the phone and allows them to come up with solutions on how to reduce this time.