Guide To Call Management

base is a good indication of activity – and this can be done on either a named customer or geographical basis, or both.

In a professional services-based organisation, this also means that where time is billed to a client, you will have accurate reports from which to generate invoices.

Managers running an inbound sales operation need to know that calls are being answered quickly and dealt with efficiently. Call management software will generate this information for you and automatically deliver the reports when you want them. Time to answer calls is critical; if callers have to wait too long to be answered, they can always ring off and buy elsewhere. Here call management will provide you a list of ‘lost calls’ and average time to answer. What’s more you can have this on an hourly, daily or weekly basis – you decide. And if the measurement is that critical, why not have the bad news emailed to you as it happens so that you can take corrective action. Think of the payback in increased sales and productivity.

Marketing managers can identify the impact of their sales promotion programmes almost in real-time. Say you place an advert announcing a special offer with a unique number for customers to call. Call management will tell you how many calls you received on that number by the hour, or any other time period you care to specify.

Call ManagementExplained

What is it? Call management is a software-based application that monitors all calls within an organisation and provides management reports to show where costs can be attributed. Most call management systems have a standard set of management reports that can be generated as well as the ability to use ‘wizards’ to construct bespoke reports directly linked to individual company business processes. Modern call management systems provide greater functionality and can measure a complete set of business parameters, for example, time to answer, most frequently dialled numbers and missed calls.

Why have it? The resultant management reports generated by call management applications have a wider range of business use. From checking call bills with your network operator, generating a list of top dialled destinations through to monitoring abuse of your telephone system. Call management systems can determine if you have too few lines to answer your customers’ calls (missed business) as well as the time taken to answer calls – too long and you miss even more business. Want to measure the productivity of one sales team against another or check that you are spending too much time on the phone to low-value customers? – then call management is for you.

Pricing: If you just want simple tracking and reporting of voice-based telephony then costs start from around £500 to £1000. For email and internet monitoring, think about the £2500 mark and for networked call management – tracking all the calls in say a 20 branch organisation, then prices can rise to around £25,000.