Contact centers process a high volume of contacts to meet marketing, sales, customer service, technical support, and other business objectives. A fine-tuned contact center distributes contacts efficiently and optimizes the use of agents and other resources. This section describes the inbound contact center environment and how resources interact to process voice contacts.
Call Accounting ensures businesses have a true picture of how and where their telecommunication budgets are spent. This chapter discusses how Call Accounting can be used to track phone use, reconcile carrier bills, and bill back departments, and how it costs calls and detects toll fraud.
You can use Call Accounting to track phone use and to determine
The average duration of calls.
Generate the Employee Group Accounting Summary report. This report provides the average duration and cost of calls made by each employee of an employee group.
Where most of your long-distance budget is spent, and which employees make the most and longest calls.
Generate the Employee Accounting by Phone number/Location report. If you have added these phone numbers and names to your database (YourSite ExplorerPhone numbers), they will also appear in the report. This report also provides you with a list of the 100 most often dialed phone numbers by employee, and the 100 longest calls by employee.
If your telephone system is being abused, in real time
Monitor call costs and other call statistics by extension in real time. You can set alarms, for any or all extensions, for all call statistics, including caller ID information (such as caller name and number). You can also set alarms based on call cost thresholds and toll fraud parameters. Alarm notifications alert you when event thresholds are reached. You can choose to be notified by visual changes in the monitor, sound prompts, pop ups, or email. By setting alarms based on the thresholds you define, you can monitor telephone system abuse and stop it as it occurs.
You can set up Call Accounting to detect billing errors. When you configure Call Accounting to mimic your phone carrier charges, you might notice discrepancies between your amounts and your carrier amounts.
To bill back departments, your call costing information must be accurate. If your call costing information is inaccurate, and you charge your subscribers less than you yourself are charged by the phone company, then you are losing money. Of course, you do not have to assign the same rates to subscriber calls that the phone company charges you for your calls. You can modify the rate to include a markup or intentionally provide a discount.
You can set alarms, for any or all extensions, for all call statistics, including caller ID information (such as caller name and number). You can also set alarms based on call cost thresholds and toll fraud parameters. Alarm notifications alert you when event thresholds are reached. You can choose to be notified by visual changes in the monitor, sound prompts, pop ups, or email. By setting alarms based on the thresholds you define, you can monitor telephone system abuse and stop it as it occurs.