Written by: Kari Bittner, Director of Channel Account Management
A sales employee could easily say something like this, “When you send me those call accounting reports showing my call history from my desk phone, it looks like I’m not as productive as I really am. You’re not taking into account the calls I’ve made on the mobile phone you got for me. Frankly, I use my company cell phone more than my office phone.”
One of the common business drivers for call accounting software is to help assess employee productivity, particularly for employees whose success may be based on interactions with customers or vendors. For example, sales teams. It’s still true that nearly every employee has a desk phone or soft phone these days, but a many companies also provide a company mobile phone. When you’re counting calls to correlate call volumes with orders booked, how can you make accurate performance decisions and guide your team if your measurement tool is only getting part of the calling picture?
On the other hand, it feels a bit overwhelming thinking about what it would take to merge the calling data by employee for both the company-provided desk/soft phones and the company-provided mobile phones. Find all of the data sources and what fields you need to capture from each one for this project. Figure out how to get a regular data feed from every desk phone system, every mobile phone, everyday. Then get the “assignment” data so you know which employee belongs to each extension/end point and mobile device. And understand which employees belong to which cost centers. And how to keep up with the ongoing changes over time. Then mash it all together and make a report for each person for just their calls. The manager needs one that assembles the calls for just their employees. Basically, it’s not likely to happen unless you have some tool that could do that data collection, combination, simplification, and reporting for you. While we’re at it, just about any business driver for “traditional” call accounting only tells part of the phone story, if you’re only paying attention to the use of the desk phone.
Employee voice communications is bigger than just traditional desk phone voice. Call Accounting – only part of the voice story if you’re not also addressing wireless.
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