CTI Group

Service Billing and Provisioning

Call management systems take the call details from a company’s telephone system and use those detail records to create reports and analyses of the call activity. Records can be pulled from selective extensions, or all extensions, depending on the needs of the company.

For example, many professional services firms use call management systems to tally up client calls for client billing. Most professional services firms bill for their time, so a quick report of time spent speaking to a number can make bill-back far easier and more accurate. Law firms are a prime example of how these firms use call management systems to track their billable hours.

As another example, hotels use call management systems to provide phone services to their guests and to effectively charge back for the guests’ services. This call activity is then billed back to the guest on their final bill. The call management system makes keeping track of this call activity easy for the hotel so they don’t have to dig through the call records manually and instead can depend on the reports sent to them by the call management system.

Departmental and Employee Chargeback

Originally, call management systems were created to be used within a corporation to allocate costs from department to department. Call accounting systems are used to allocate costs back to division, departments and even individual employees. Companies used call management systems to monitor the number of long distance calls placed from a given extension and to charge those departments or employees for those long distance calls. Such systems can also provide data directly to accounting and human resource systems.

Staff Productivity

Call management systems provide visibility of the calling patterns and activities of employees and can be used to improve productivity. By identifying call patterns that might be decreasing productivity or identifying personal calls made during business hours, companies are able to improve productivity and reduce costs at the same time. The reports provided by a call management system can also be used to evaluate the productivity of help desk and customer service staff.

Now Proteus has integrated with Smartrecord. This cost-effective, user-friendly, any time, anywhere call recording solution ensures that you have the flexibility, scalability, and compliance coverage you need – with no capital investment in hardware or software for our web based solution.

The integration of Proteus and SmartRecord® allows the customers to generate reports in Proteus and are able to listen to the voice part of the calls in the reports. Using Proteus’ sophisticated report builder, customers can easily find the calls and listen. These calls may be malicious, emergency, customer dispute, staff training, expensive, long duration or longest response calls.

It has added an extra dimension to the call accounting system reports. Not only Proteus reports provide valuable management information, now the customers can listen to the calls in the reports.

What is the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR)?

TSR covers telemarketing - any plan, program, or campaign to sell goods or services through interstate telephone calls. The rule requires telemarketers to make certain disclosures and prohibits lies. It gives state law enforcement officers the authority to prosecute fraudulent telemarketers who operate across state lines. And it gives consumers instructions on how to stop unwanted calls. Just say, “Put me on your DO-NOT-CALL list.” Companies use call recording to prove their compliance with the TSR.

Failure to comply:

“Failure to provide any of the required information in a “clear and conspicuous” manner, before the consumer pays for the goods or services offered, is a deceptive telemarketing act or practice that violates the rule, and subjects a seller or telemarketer to a $10,000 fine for each violation.”

How can call recording help your business stay compliant?

By easily keeping precise records of all call communication! A call recording does not lie. You will have picture perfect proof of activities such sales calls, orders and conversations that took place over the phone.

SmartRecord® is the logical choice for call centers everywhere. Our scalable solution is both easy to install, competitively priced, and provides the following benefits:

• Reliable call recording that assists in complying with TSR regulations     

• Multiple product permission settings to ensure call recording security

• Powerful encryption functionality to protect confidential information

• Intuitive user interface that helps users find recorded information quickly and easily

• Efficient playback features that can be activated based on different search parameters

 •Flexible recording options that enable program administrators to specify unique program configurations

As a mortgage professional, your business depends on unique selling positions to differentiate your company from the rest.  Competition is intense and the ability to see and monitor calls in real time can be the key to increasing your transaction yield. 

Recording phone calls can help to ensure that all contract details are correct. The broker can refer back to the recorded call to verify that he/she has all details correct.

By Integrating Call Recording Software into your system, you can be sure the call is connected to the correct person and handled appropriately. Calls can be monitored in real-time or chosen at random to review the call-flow process and to ensure superior customer care.

Within the insurance industry, recording phone calls is now considered standard industry  practice. Companies record customer interactions for a variety of reasons. For insurance companies the reasons are many. Most insurance companies are required by law to maintain standards of operation, call recording can help to prove compliance with these regulations. Also, insurance companies record calls to keep a record of witness statements to assist in the claims process. Finally, many insurance companies use call recording to help in training their staff to ensure that clients are being assisted properly and situations are being dealt with effectively. 

Computerized records management is a key application for every insurance company and CTI Group revolutionizes the use of call recording by integrating software systems used to manage customer, policy and claim records. Call Records and MP3, phone conversation related to the client’s record are easy to find and attach to a claim file. It is much easier than it is to locate a related fax or email message.

Larger companies must also address security concerns. To prevent loss of data due to hardware problems, redundant hard disks as well as backup for databases, recorded calls and configuration settings are needed. Ability to connect to a UPS offers high reliability and shuts down a system smoothly to prevent corruption of data during power failures.

Proteus is a call management system that automatically tracks all events and calculate cost and provides automated reports on these events.

Key Business Drivers for Proteus Applications

Save Communication Costs

·         Compare different carriers and choose the most cost effective provider

·         Identify excessive personal telephone calls

Increase Employee Productivity

·         Highlight busy times when resources need re-allocation

·         Identify needless long duration calls

Improve Customer Service

·         Set targets for key performance indicators, like time to answer and length of call

·         Track Incoming, outgoing and missed calls

1. Notify your carrier that you want to subscribe to SmartRecord for your IP Call Recording Needs. Your carrier will ask you what phone numbers you want to record.

2. Use your phone

- iPhone – sync your call recording with Sugar CRM directly from the phone.

- Deskphone – sync your call recording with Sugar CRM using the browser-based recording application.

- Use the browser-based SmartRecord recording application to view your recorded calls in a dashboard, categorize calls, annotate calls, place comments in calls, set-up call alerts.

Robust and targeted reporting
Proteus Enterprise includes advanced filtering that enables telecom managers to easily design and update any number of customized reports.  Reporting enables telecom managers to provide costing, traffic analysis, and trending reports.  The telecom manager can format the reports as Adobe PDF, Microsoft Excel and other common formats.  Additionally, data can be exported from Proteus as a comma separated values (csv) file.

Alarms to detect problems, save money
Proteus Enterprise is equipped with a versatile alarm system that alerts key personnel of actions within the call accounting system. Proteus includes a default set of ten alarm templates and can be customized and sent to an individual or group,  typically via e-mail or flagged on screen.  Alarms provide instant information once a call is terminated.

Proteus Trader is ideal for financial institutions which have complex voice networks. It is the preferred solution in trading environments to manage mixed voice architectures consisting of  Trading Systems, PABX, and mobile phones worldwide.

Proteus is the only telemanagement product which can log up to 512 sites on a single platform, with up to 70,000 extensions and 5,000 dealer positions.

Proteus’ web based delivery allows voice managers to view and manage telephony costs, usage and response times across any number of sites, while providing local personnel access to view information that is important to them – be it a single department, single site or group of sites.

The alarms package can be configured to provide proactive alarms on premium rate calls, calls to emergency numbers, unanswered calls, high cost calls and many other call types you might wish to specify.

• Private Wire Utilization: up to the minute statistics on the usage and user per private wire

• Carrier Cost Validation: allocates costs to a user and department (or cost center) while taking into account least cost routing (LCR)

• Routed Call Analyzer: cost mapping utility allocates the calls made by the Trader via PABX back to his/her unique identification and/or trading group.

• Traffic Analysis: provides the usage of trunks across multiple sites to ensure that there is 100% availability, while reducing wasteful overcapacity.

• Productivity Analysis: provides a database of customers called and analysis of the productivity in contacting those customers.