For suppliers, there is a tremendously lucrative commercial opportunity within the call accounting market place. Alas, until now, reseller companies have been unable to take advantage of this potential due to limitations on their capability to render service.
The truth is, the ordinary customer can't depend on their call accounting system. Reseller organizations are only partly to blame, there are inherent service problems with stand alone tools. The practicalities of maintaining these tools limits the dealer's capability to deliver.
Here we cover the main problems and suggest a strategy to revitalize the business.
The principle issue centers on the practicalities of on-site service.
As part of a survey of reseller companies we posed the questions;
a, In your client base, how many call accounting programs have been installed?
b. Do you know with certainty what percentage are actually receiving call data today?
c. Considering those functional packages what fraction are correctly pricing telephone calls using up-to-date rates?
The replies we got were surprising, an overwhelmingly high percentage of reseller companies didn't know what number of packages were working but surmised about seventy percent. Of those functional programs, about fifty percent were tariffing calls accurately. The result, just thirty five percent of the installed customer base were fully functional.
Next question,
When a customer reports a problem, what is the average "time to respond"?
A high percentage responded to the effect, "as a company we do not view call accounting as mission critical, when we have a service engineer in the area with time on his hands we take care of it."
A reseller organization sincere about making a profit in this market segment must put in more effort than this.
The computer architecture of a stand alone system is also a limiting component, a stand-alone tool with no way 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 product, the reseller firm waits for the end user to report a fault, the client discovers something is wrong when a report does not work. The program could have been faulty for two weeks or longer. Add to this the "non urgent" nature of the fault and potentially we have "response times" exceeding two weeks. Not Good!.
The computer architecture of how distributors deliver the tool has to change, happily there is a new alternative, it is in Software as a Service. Call accounting offered as an Internet based solution, with automatic monitoring 24/7 and delivering a well managed service with up-times of five 9s (99.999%) that facilitate a next day response to service issues, and client's requests can be responded to by one telephone call or email.
This defines the future of call accounting, the old stand alone systems are dead, reseller organizations cannot be profitable with the old technology, but they can flourish by offering a much improved web based service to end users and at the same time improve their revenue stream by making sixty to eighty percent monthly margin.
With a a background spanning twenty five years as a successful corporate account manager, Mike Guile imparts front line expertise in operating voice communications for companies large and small.
He offers potential clients a free trial of the globes foremost Internet based call accounting solution, install it on any size site. Get more here
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Guile
