5 Savvy Ways to Make the Most of Your Call Accounting Software

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Copyright © 2010 Alexander Anoshin


If you are looking for a savvy way to improve your business efficiency with a low input, learn 5 call accounting tips to increase your enterprise VoIP network ROI.

1. Cut Your Employee Telecom Expenses

Call accounting software can help you not only calculate your employee telecom costs but also decrease them sharply. To do this you should:

analyze thoroughly various reports that your call accounting software builds on the base of call detail records (CDR records) received from your IP PBX;

determine:

+ the longest and the most expensive calls,

+ which employees spend the most for phone conversations,

+ contribution of these calls to your business development (for example, select communications with high-value prospects and "friends and family" calls);

set a number of rules for your employees to eliminate unnecessary calls;

setup your call-accounting software to:

+ limit employee expenses on paid calls,

+ restrict paid calls if a limit is reached,

+ deny access to long-distance calls,

+ group calls by users/user groups and allocate expenses properly to correct budgets (enable charge back to departments, cost centers and clients).

You can also make special settings to make your staff more responsible using your enterprise VoIP network.

2. Make Your Employees More Responsible Using Corporate Telecom Resources

Telephony network misuse/abuse often causes excessive telecom costs. To eliminate these expenses and make your enterprise IP telephony network even more profitable you can:

examine CDR reports to check if your employees observe your telephony usage rules (let us consider two striking examples: an employee calls to a corporate toll free number using a mobile phone that results in paying twice for his/her calls - for the toll free call plus the mobile call or employees use external conferencing services instead of using your IP PBX conferencing features);

setup your call-accounting software to

+ restrict calls to flagged numbers, cities, countries,

+ track calls to/from suspicious phone numbers with immediate automatic notifications sent to an appropriate person in your organization when such number is dialed/called from (for example, this facility can help schools and colleges prevent false calls to emergency organizations or protect your employees from threatening/abusive calls).

Besides, all the above can help you improve your employee productivity and save time and money on daily tasks.

3. Enhance Your Employee Productivity

Use the facility to group automatically calls by users/user groups to both speed up and simplify your accounting staff daily operations and always have timely information on expenses of each phone user. For example, if you manage a hotel, your accounting staff can use call-accounting software to provide your quests with information about their phone conversations any time they need it.

On the other hand, CDR reports can help you:

determine peak phone network hours and compose an appropriate call plan;

select "friends and family" calls and set a number of rules to limit them (by duration/cost or in peak load hours);

control productivity of your call-center staff and sales managers and assume timely measures to improve it.

Thus you will simultaneously increase your customer service quality.

4. Improve Your Customer Satisfaction

Get from CDR reports the answers to such questions as:

Do your client calls stay unanswered?

Do your employees return calls in a timely manner?

Does your staff give adequate attention to your high-value customers? etc. and take necessary measures (see above) to both improve your customer satisfaction and turn prospects into your clients.

CDR report analysis can also help you control your marketing and advertising ROI.

5. Measure the Efficiency of Your Marketing Efforts

To get well-timed information about the efficiency of your marketing and advertising campaigns, you can direct phone inquiries to a dedicated extension and track incoming calls with your call-accounting software that will become your easy-to-use tool to control marketing ROI and timely stop losing campaigns or enforce the winning ones.

Case Study: Call-Accounting Software for a Large Manufacturing Enterprise

Today, many vendors suggest "out-of-the-box" call-accounting software with various functionality for companies of various sizes. But, sometimes, the deployment of a custom call-accounting solution can be more advantageous. For an example, to:

increase the efficiency of a VoIP network with about M Cisco IP phones and N Cisco CallManager servers,

speed up employee communications by decreasing time, wasted on searching for a necessary contact information at a large manufacturing enterprise, special call-accounting software was developed. It provides:

various CDR reports to analyze employee calls;

settings to manage/limit expenses on paid calls of each user/user group individually and restrict paid calls when a limit is reached;

connectors to the existing accounting and HRM software to streamline corresponding daily tasks of appropriate staff members:

+ to allocate timely phone costs to appropriate budgets,

+ to manage phone numbers and automatically update corporate address book;

multi-location inventory facility to do phone inventory at all enterprise sites from a single working place.

Deployment of this solution proved to cut telecom expenses and essentially increase employee productivity.

Conclusion

As it was shown above, you can use call-accounting software with extended settings and wide reporting facilities to:

control your employee telephony costs;

make your staff more responsible using corporate telecom resources;

increase employee productivity and save time and money on daily tasks;

improve your client satisfaction;

control the efficiency of marketing and advertising efforts and take timely measures to increase it,

and thus make several important steps towards your business prosperity.


About the Author:
You can learn how to empower your enterprise with VoIP in the book, "The Connected Enterprise", here http://bcs-it.com/books/connected-enterprise/ The free e-book, just as the article, was written by Alexander Anoshin, the CEO of BCS-IT, who specializes in business IP telephony solution development.


Read more of Alexander Anoshin's articles.