Why Can A Few Call Accounting Suppliers Give A Better Solution To End Users?

For reseller organizations, there is a highly lucrative business opportunity inside the call accounting market. Unfortunately, until now, suppliers have been unable to take advantage of this potential due to limitations on their ability to render service.



The truth is, the normal client cannot depend on their call accounting tool. Reseller organizations are only partly responsible, there are inherent service problems with stand alone systems. The practicalities of servicing these systems restricts the reseller firm's ability to deliver.



Here we deal with the main issues and offer a plan to revitalize the business.



The main problem centers on product reliability.



In a recent questionnaire of resellers we posed the questions;



a, In your client base, approximately how many call accounting platforms are installed?



b. Can you say with certainty what percentage are actually collecting call data at present?



c. Of those functional units how many are correctly costing telephone calls with todays tariffs?

The responses that we received were surprising, a high percentage of reseller firms did not know how many platforms were operating but guessed about seventy percent. Of those functional systems, about fifty percent were tariffing calls accurately. The end result, just thirty five percent of the installed client base were completely functional.



Another question,



If your client reports a fault, what is your average "time to respond"?



In general they replied to the effect, "we don't consider call accounting as mission critical, when we have a service engineer in the locality with spare time we attend to it."



A reseller company serious about making a profit in this industry must try harder than this.



The nature of a stand alone product is also a restricting factor, a stand alone tool without the ability for the reseller company to remotely interface with it is just not going to play a part in the future of call accounting.



With a stand alone tool, the reseller organization waits for the customer to report a breakdown, the end user discovers something is wrong when a report does not work. The system could have been faulty for a week or longer. Compound this with the "non urgent" treatment of the service request and possibly we have "response times" greater than two weeks. Is this good enough?.



The very computer architecture of how resellers offer the system has to change, however there is a new alternative, Software as a Service. Call accounting provided as an Internet based solution, automatically monitored 24/7 and providing a professionally managed system with up-times of 99.9% that enable a following day response to problems, and customer's queries can be replied to by a single call or email.



This defines the future of call accounting, the traditional stand-alone products have died, reseller firms can't be profitable with outdated technology, but they can flourish by providing a superior web based service to clients and simultaneously improve their bottom line by making sixty to eighty percent monthly gross margin.





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With a a history spanning

20 years as a

accomplished corporate account manager, Mike

Guile has front line

experience in operating voice

communications for clients large and

small.



He offers potential customers a free trial of

the globes leading Web

based call accounting application, test it on any size

site. Find more here