Operational Benefits of Call Management Systems

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.