Call Accounting Featured Article

The Many Benefits of Call Accounting

  By Alicia Young, Web Editor

Call accounting and reporting systems are vital to company operations for a number of reasons. Put simply, call accounting and reporting systems “capture Call Detail Records (CDR) from telephone systems to report on telecom usage, telecom costs and employee activity.” This according to ISI (News - Alert) Telemanagement Solutions, which has its own offering, Infortel Select, to support the collection and processing of CDR from all telecom sources (on-premise PBX (News - Alert) and VoIP servers, Centrex and other hosted services, local and long distance carriers, conference services and wireless handsets).

 According to ISI, call accounting solutions have numerous benefits to users, including traffic analysis, employee productivity, abuse and misuse detection, contact center metrics, historic call archive, carrier bill reconciliation, cost allocation, cost reduction and tenant billing. Let’s take a look at how some of these features can benefit companies.

Traffic analysis. As ISI writes, “Traffic Analysis helps organizations determine if they are over or under trunked. Utilizing Traffic Analysis reports, an organization can identify their busy hours and how many trunks were used during those busy hours. From these metrics, they can establish the correct number of trunks needed to handle the busy hours at the grade-service they determine.”

Employee productivity. Solutions like Infortel Select include business intelligence reporting that enables organizations to measure and monitor employee productivity. Supervisors can look at productivity reports based on hours, days or weeks. They can even take a look at call handling summaries based on hourly data.

Abuse and misuse detection. In a call center setting, for example, it can be difficult to tell whether an employee is on the phone with a customer, or if they’re using the company phone for personal calls. This is true of any position that requires a lot of phone time. Obviously, company phones are only meant to be used for business purposes during work hours, and call accounting allows supervisors to monitor usage. Call accounting solutions can set customizable alarms that alert supervisors when phones are being misused.

These are only a few of the many benefits that accompany call accounting solutions. You can find the rest of ISI’s insights here.