Telecommunications can be one of the biggest expenses for most small business, so managing that expense is important if you want to improve your company’s bottom line. Your phone system is one of the most valuable tools in your arsenal to give you a competitive edge, and with call accounting, you have a huge opportunity to gain a wealth of information about your operations.
By capturing and recording your businesses telephone usage and events, you can monitor when, how and why calls are placed or received, which allows for data analysis and reporting in real-time.
Web-based call accounting can help you do everything from identifying call types to tracing the origin and duration of calls. It can also give you the ability to record calls for training and performance review purposes. Seeing the patterns of usage means you can see potential areas to save on business operational costs going forward.
Other benefits of tracking call traffic include protecting your phone system from security risk as you can identify the misuse of phone lines, rectify errors, and prevent overcharges on international and personal calls. If you know the extent and details of your outbound and inbound calls, you can have a better idea of how your phone system is being used, which ultimately gives you more control over how the system is managed.
Here are four reasons why you should implement a call accounting system for your small business:
1. Boost employee productivity
Call accounting is a great tool to help show your employees how they can better communicate and improve their work practices. When you know many calls are coming in, when they are being made and how long the calls are averaging, you now have hard data to help manage communication tactics.
For example, you can evaluate the differences and effectiveness of your sales employees and responsiveness of customer service staff by seeing the calling patterns and phone activity metrics. Call reporting helps you reduce productivity loss by minimizing non-business calling activity and seeing which trunks and extensions are unused. If there are any internal abuses of the phone system itself, you can also use that information to improve the efficiency of your workforce.
2. Lowers operational costs and increases revenues
When you collect call detail record (CDR) data, you have information at your fingertips about numbers dialed, incoming call origins, extensions used to make calls and then length of conversations. There’s also an ability to search and analyze the phone usage data so you can help allocate costs back to certain departments or even individual employees. This makes budgeting of your business phone system expenses that much more targeted and accurate. In the long run, it can help you reduce your telecommunication costs overall.
3. Optimize network usage
Small businesses can, through call accounting, determine if their voice and data networks are being utilized efficiently, at capacity, or underutilized. Call accounting makes it possible to see the queue times, any abandoned calls and other useful stats so you can allocate resources accordingly and plan going forward. Because web-based call accounting can also be platform independent, you can access your network data from any device and operation system, and different managers can even pull reports accordingly from any laptop, tablet or mobile device.
4. Useful metrics can help identify security threats
Monitoring and analyzing data on your phone system supports managers in tracking and reporting on expenses, but it also can protect your company from internal and external security threats. Call accounting can show you what, if any network attacks there were, or any attempted intrusions into the network by easily showing any activity that deviates from normal usage through alerts. This tool helps with corporate accounting practices too and automates the monitoring of sales and financial performance.
