The ability to gather telephone call records, process and report them has been around since the early 1980s. Call management has been a basic staple of telecom managers, hotels and professional firms. With today's constantly evolving telecom innovations, customers are more than ever in need of metrics for all aspects of their communication networks.
Historically call accounting software has delivered on the promise of cost recovery with estimates ranging from 10-40% of a business telecom expenses. The software is an excellent watchdog of excessive equipment fees, billing irregularities, policy abuse and toll fraud. Most telecom managers traditionally relied on concrete historical call detail records (CDR) to optimize services, carrier comparisons and convergence planning. The cost of a telephone call has been steadily decreasing with the introduction of peer to peer free calling, flat rate plans and bundled services.
Customer service, employee productivity and workforce management have always been critical concerns of most businesses. Call accounting can examines the health of an organization by looking at calling patterns, frequency of calls, network traffic and facility performance. A good call accounting software package addresses the changing landscape of communications management with robust cost effective, comprehensive array of reporting and management tools.
Call accounting software packages that historically focused on telephone tracking and expense management have transformed themselves into comprehensive browser based communication management systems (CMS). These systems include extension, line, operator, auto attendant, ACD, IVR, voice mail and other facility traffic. The ability to track call duration, call distribution, ring time, hold time and call queues has allowed leading communication management systems to analyze, measure and increase productivity.
The analysis of communication facility logs can be important in optimizing and provisioning of IP PBXs, VoIP services, wireless equipment, multi-party conference and other call handling applications. Today call accounting can act as a means of consolidation with mergers, acquisitions, and new technologies creating non-uniform networks. The new call accounting remains a core weapon in the arsenal of all telecom and IT managers.
Rito Salomone is President of Resource Software International Ltd. (RSI). To contact the author, please email rsalomone@telecost.com
RSI is recognized as an industry leader in the field of communication management. The communication management product portfolio includes tailored integration to the most popular switching and network manufactures. RSI has been granted Nortel Developer Partner status with recognition for its core portfolio as Compatible Products. RSI is a Cisco Technology Partner, Siemens HiPath Ready Standard certified, Avaya DeveloperConnect Member, Mitel MiSN Member, Adtran Complementary Solutions Provider, NEC Univerge Partner and Alcatel Applications Partner.
For more information contact us at rsi@telecost.com or visit http://www.telecost.com/!