CTI Group

1. Improves Customer Service: By having access to your customers via email, you are able to provide them with other bits of information about your company and their offerings.  This provides your customers with the most up-to-date information on your services and specials. Equally, customers are able to review their bill quickly and easily with the analysis already done for them. At a glance, they can review departmental allocations and identify areas for concern.  Many of the questions that are so prevalent in reviewing a bill can be alleviated with the detailed drill down functions of eBilling.  You can easily drill into the details of your bill without having to sift through hundreds of pages of call logs.

2. Improves organization of past bills: Rather than having to go the cellar to review file cabinet after file cabinet of past bills, bills can be organized electronically for easy retrieval in the future when needed.

3. Decreases Carbon Footprint: eBilling software allows the billing company and the customer alike to become more responsible for the health of the environment.  By eliminating the paper on which the bill is printed and the checks with which the bill is paid as well as eliminating the transportation necessary to move the paper bills and checks from place to place, both the billing company and the customer company are able to help in the fight against global warming.

Provide your customers with the advantages of eBilling today!

The most recent news in call accounting is the addition of telemanagement services. Call accounting data or call detail records are often times just presented as raw data and are not nearly as effective as when they are analyzed and evaluated by a telemanagement service. Most call accounting solutions on the market today come equipped with a telemanagement service to make it easier to evaluate the data you pulled with the call accounting software.  

By converging voice and data, many call accounting systems are able to provide a wide variety of services and options from billing to provisioning and accounting for broadband services. Much like traditional call accounting systems, these systems can be centralized or distributed. The ability to monitor internet and voice activities in one location makes for efficient management of telecommunications in an organization. Most companies are looking for one solution to cover all of their needs and call accounting systems often times provide that “one stop shop” for customers.

Most companies are looking to manage their telecommunications above and beyond any one PBX or communications server. By managing telecommunications at an enterprise level, companies are able to see a much faster return on investment due to the sheer volume of interactions and are able to adhere to one uniform process over all locations. Equally, most PBXs today are able to manage multiple points of presence across an enterprise and are not necessarily as restrictive as they once were. Many companies find the use of a centrally hosted enterprise call accounting solution the most effective for the management of their resources, whereas the traditional stand-alone, geographically limited systems far less effective.

This is where application service providers come into play. With the ability to provide both stand alone and centrally hosted call accounting solutions, most Application Service Providers (ASPs) are able to fit the specific needs of their customers. Application service providers are also often times equipped with other software solutions like call recording and ACD reporting that can be quite effective when used in conjunction with a call accounting solution.

Call accounting systems collect data from a key system, PBX, iPBX, or VoIP gateway.  They pull the call detail records (CDRs) from one of the telephone systems listed above and send those call records to the telemanagement software to create reports and analysis of these records. The records can be pulled on all or selective extensions depending on the needs of the end customer. Costs and possibly revenue can be attached to the call activity that is reported, making accounting for telemanagement usage much more efficient.

Call accounting solutions are able to take the call records provided by the customer’s phone system and manage those records for the customer. Customers no longer have to sift through paper records to identify activity and cost allocation. That is done automatically with a call accounting solution making telecommunications cost management and fraud management much easier and more efficient for the end customer.

The primary benefit of Unified Communications (UC) is identifying presence which can speed up many kinds of business processes. So, for example, instead of leaving phone messages and playing phone tag with a business associate, employees can look at the presence status of the person that they are trying to reach and if that person is available, they can instant message for an immediate conversation. If the company hsa a call accounting system as part of their Unified Communications platform, they might be able to tell instantly whether an associate is available. If that associate is not available, they can contact someone else for help.  This certainly increases efficiency as employees are spending far less time trying to get a hold of one another and, even more importantly, questions can be answered quickly so that decisions and actions can be taken immediately, rather than delaying until a return phone call is received. This allows business to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

From the contact center perspective, UC empowers agents to locate experts to resolve customer issues that are beyond their scope. This allows contact centers to increase their first call resolution rates and reduce operating expenses by efficiently answering customer inquiries with one quick transfer. While this immediate access benefits the call center and customer service departments, the engineering and application development departments might not be so keen on being at the call center’s beck and call. And this is a legitimate argument.  How would developers and engineers have time to do their jobs if they are constantly being interrupted to handle call center inquiries? And given that the time of the engineer or developer is worth so much more than that of the call center agent, it is difficult to reconcile the interruption. For this reason, there has been some lag in the pick up of UC in many business applications, but the potential is there and once the operational kinks are worked out of the chain, UC is likely to become a mainstay in many businesses.

Unified Communicaitons (UC) could potentially be a game changer. This technology could change the way employees communicate with each other and the way enterprises interact with their customers. However, a lot of work needs to be done before we are to that point. UC vendors need to better communicate the potential value to the enterprise. Since the possibilities are endless, it is important that UC vendors provide as many possible scenarios to their enterprise customers because not all of the potential applications for UC will work for each enterprise customer. The uses will be unique to the business itself and every enterprise customer different.

Cisco Call Management and Cisco Unified Communications Manager are among the leading UC offerings in the industry.

The internet has become such an integral part of our every days, both at work at home. However, there are applications that still need some work. The internet’s ever-growing and ever-changing technologies seem to be making our lives easier every day, but there is still some room for improvement.

Unified Communications (UC) is a term that describes the combination of applications and technologies to provide on “unified” portfolio to customers. UC has been heralded as the next wave of change to internet applications, such as call recording and call accounting. For one supplier to provide on package of applications that are integrated with one platform and that work together to provide the most robust application set yet. The concept is that of a “one stop shop.” The applications available in UC provide real-time and non-real-time communications services. The services available with UC packaging include, but are not limited to: Internet Protocol (IP) telephony, presence, call control, speech control, instant messaging (IM)/chat, conferencing (voice and video), voicemail, email, SMS and fax.

Network Optimization

Many companies have been able to reduce their telecommunications expenditures significantly by simply being able to identify underutilized areas of their voice and data networks. Call management systems can be used to monitor network activity and bandwidth and identify trunk usage issues to highlight areas for cost reduction.  If a trunk is not being used, why pay for it? Call accounting can help companies more efficiently allocate telecommunications resources and better plan their network changes.

Security

Call management applications enable companies to shield themselves from the wide variety of internal and external security threats out there. By monitoring for intrusions and undo telecom activities, companies are able to monitor for network attacks, thereby making the company and its systems far more secure and far less vulnerable to threats.  

Essentially, call management systems provide companies with the tools to provide a safe, highly efficient, cost-effective telecommunications system for the day-to-day operations of their business.

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.