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Has Call Accounting Become Outdated The day of exorbitant long distance charges seems to be in the rear view mirror. Many competitors have jumped into the lucrative pool of communication delivery. There has been consolidation pertaining to the traditional telephone companies including a spawning of new VoIP service providers. The cost of a telephone call has been steadily decreasing with the introduction of peer to peer free calling, flat rate plans including bundled services. The telecom department in many major enterprises has been transformed or merged into other areas of IT. The need for a telecom manager may have gone the way pertaining to the dinosaur, or has it? Call accounting systems have risen to the challenge. Most traditional telephone expense management systems have been transformed into broader including more robust communication management systems (CMS). Toll fraud or finding excessive cost calls is absolutely no longer a major priority. A robust call accounting system spans well beyond the traditional component of telephone expense management. Call accounting examines the health of a particular organization by looking at calling patterns, frequency of calls, network traffic including facility performance. If Jimmy is making 100 calls a day but none of them are long distance, a traditional system that focuses on cost will fail to recognize Jimmy’s calling patterns. Non-business local calls, incoming calls including toll free calls should result in big productivity losses for a particular organization. Frequently called numbers reports should shed a great deal of light on corporate calling patterns, marketing initiatives including telephone abuse. Conversely, Jimmy may be a rising start in the company if all his calls are for networking. Examining calling patterns is essential in fine-tuning including increasing productivity. Today, there are many entry points into a particular organization. Auto attendant, voice mail, interactive voice response, email including live operator are some pertaining to the many facilities utilized by most average businesses. A strong communication management system could provide statistics that measure the performance of all these entry points. It is imperative that hackers, overflow or failures do not cause bottlenecks that hamper the communication flow of a particular organization. If a problem arises a particular effective communication management system should alert administrators in real time. You absolutely cannot manage what you absolutely cannot measure! Call accounting could always remain a pillar in the evolution of communication management. Recent polls indicate that VoIP is fast becoming the dominant form of communication. There are countless businesses that may be caught with their pants down. Most companies do not even have a proper migration strategy. Communication management should help ease the transition by highlighting traffic volumes, peak hours, grade of service, abandoned calls, blocked calls, calls to reception including various other peg counts. These statistics could help determine the bandwidth needs including requirements for auto attendant, wireless, IVR including other services.
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