EarthBend Distribution is proud to partner with Metropolis Technologies, a leading provider of advanced call accounting, 911/emergency notification and telemanagement applications.  In today’s post, Metropolis discusses five ways in which the deployment of call accounting technology can positively impact your customers’ business operations.

How Call Accounting Can Change Your Business

What could tracking and managing voice communications throughout your business possibly offer?

Cost savings? Productivity boosts? Insight?

Yep, you nailed it. Call accounting tracks every phone call made or received by every extension in the workplace and sums it up into deliciously digestible tidbits of information (aka call reports) that save companies money, improve productivity, and help measure, change, and improve the way the entire business communicates.

Here are a few of the improvements your business could expect to make if you choose to utilize call accounting:

Improve Accountability on Telecom Costs

Does your accounting team get excited when the phone bill comes in each month? I bet they can’t wait to bill back all those telecom charges back to those wasteful department heads!

Wait, no? That sounds like a lot of work? Sure it does.

With accurate call costing, call accounting can help organizations to keep on top of telecom charges in real-time, not just when the carrier bill arrives. By automating usage reports by day, week, or month, department heads won’t get a surprise when their budget is hit at the end of the month. Plus, by making employees accountable for their usage (such as unnecessary 411 charges), it encourages a reduction of unnecessary charges.

It’s Customer Service’s Fault:

Customers don’t like to wait. In today’s on-demand market, patience is a rare commodity, and customers that are forced to wait, well, they get… grumpy.

On average, how long do your customers wait before they reach someone? Are they often transferred from department to department before they actually get a little help? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, call accounting might be a big eye opener for you.

Dimension Research found that 69% of respondents cited being “extremely frustrated” after experiencing a lengthy hold time when contacting a company. Don’t let this be you.

Try Right-Sizing On for Size:

When is the last time you analyzed your voice network traffic and determined peak volume? Sound like a boring, tedious job? It could be; especially if you don’t have an easy way to identify call volume patterns or peak periods. And why would one want to do such a thing, anyways?

Because busy signals result in frustrated customers. And frustrated customers don’t stay customers.

By tracking call activity throughout the day, call accounting solutions give your IT team the voice traffic analysis data they need to make sure your voice network is the right size. Not too small causing peak periods when callers cannot get through. And no wasteful phone lines that are costing the company money each month. Ahh, just right.

Because All Calls Matter:

Inbound lead generation remains one of the most coveted results of a good marketing campaign. This is geek speak for ‘the phone rings’.

No matter how exciting online marketing has gotten, old-fashioned ringing phones are still a highly prized sign that business is good. According to BIA/Kelsey, 65% of businesses consider phone calls to be their best, most productive lead source.

If your business is relying on the sales team to attribute lead acquisition, you are missing out. Call accounting can make this so easy! By measuring how many inbound calls your business is generating, and tracking DNIS or DID numbers back to a marketing campaign, your marketers can revel in the accuracy and get to crunching those ROI numbers.

You’ve Got Slackers! Find Them:

No one likes a quiet sales floor.

As mentioned in the section above regarding marketing, ringing phones make for a happy and busy office. Nowhere else is this more important than in the sales department.

“But our sales team communicates by using email!” you might say.

When the roar of overlapping voices is replaced by quiet little taps, you have a problem. Sure, email is a critical communication tool, but how many deals have been closed through email?

Deals are closed by building trust and gaining rapport; an impossible feat by reading text on a screen. Call accounting can enable sales managers and teams to accurately track how much call activity is taking place, and correlate this activity to sales numbers.

I’ll bet you’ll find those with the most calls are also those with the most sales.

Takeaways:

Call accounting is a simple solution that can provide big value to a business. From optimizing call routing structures, to determining peak call volume, this stuff is pretty powerful.