9 Savvy Ways to Reduce the Cost of Your Existing Enterprise IP Telephony Network

Enterprise IP telephony proved to be a great communication tool to unite distant employees in a solid team, to reduce costs for international calls, to improve productivity and not only that. Moreover, there are many ways to make enterprise IP telephony network usage even more attracting.

From this white paper, you will learn about:

5 effective ways to reduce expenses for paid calls:

• manage your employee telecom expenses effectively by setting limits of expenses for paid calls for each user or user group individually and restrict paid calls when a limit is reached;

Implementation of such software at a large manufacturing enterprise proved to decrease expenses for phone communications, IP PBX administration and VoIP network ownership.
• cut costs for unwanted calls by restricting calls to specific phone numbers, city/country codes;
• eliminate “friends & family” calls and stop paying for private conversations of your employees;
• re-bill users (departments/sites/employees/clients) for phone charges;
• bill your clients for their phone consultations;

4 valid tips to decrease costs for IPT network ownership and administration:

• simplify IP PBX administration and cut your monthly expenses for It sharply;
• eliminate costs for wasted working time, spent searching for contact information with a timely updated corporate “Address-book”;
• spend less on phone inventory management and always provide timely information about availability of needed items with a multi-location phone inventory feature;
• remove compatibility restrictions and cut costs for your network extension and upgrade;

a unique solution that combines call-accounting and IP telephony network administration features

to cover all the ways of telecom costs reduction. The solution developed by BCS-IT allowed a large manufacturing enterprise to decrease expenses for phone communications, IP PBX administration and VoIP network ownership.

Do You Know That Your Expenses for Business Communications and IP Telephony Network Ownership Could be Less?

During the last 10 years most of large and mid-size businesses deployed IP telephony (IPT) systems to both connect far-flung offices, achieve more flexibility in communications and cut down on PBX costs.

But with all benefits an enterprise VoIP network provides, there are still ways to increase the efficiency of its maintenance and decrease usage and administration costs.

You can cut expenses for:

• unnecessary business and “friends & family” calls;
• IP PBX administration where excessive cost originates from management interface complicacy;
• wasted employee working time spent searching necessary colleague contact information, missed inventory or data on paid calls;
• expensive software/hardware components of special trends purchased for network extension and upgrade instead of cheaper analogues of other vendors, because of compatibility requirements;
• client calls, if you consult your clients by phone, as lawyers or psychologists often do, and it could be reasonable to bill them for their charges.

Presented here are 9 effective ways to save money with a custom call-accounting & enterprise IP telephony network management software.

5 Effective Ways to Reduce Costs for Telephony Communications

1. Manage Effectively Your Employee Telecom Expenses with a Flexible System of Limits on Paid Calls

Call-accounting and IPT management software provides you with a set of easy-to-use reports, built on the base of call detail records (CDRs) received from enterprise IP PBX, that you can use to

• group outgoing calls by a user or user group;
• analyze information about call length, phone number (city/country), price;
• limit expenses on paid calls in an appropriate currency for each user or user group individually;
• set automatic restriction on paid calls, when a limit is reached;
• deny access to long-distance calls for selected users or user groups.

Besides that, you can prohibit calls to some pre-defined numbers.

2. Cut Costs for Unwanted Calls with a Restriction on Calls to Flagged Numbers

After you analyze your CDR reports, you can wish to reduce costs for communications with a complete restriction of outgoing calls to special countries, cities or phone numbers.

With IP telephony network management software you can set such restrictions both for all the users and for any user or user group individually.

You can also track calls to flagged numbers (when a user dials such number, an administrator or another person responsible for this job receives an immediate notification) and thus control calls to suspicious phone numbers. For example, this facility makes sense to schools and colleges, where it helps prevent false calls to emergency organizations. But anyway it makes your employees more responsible using corporate VoIP and saves you from unnecessary expenses.

Another way to pay significantly less for phone communications is to restrict long-time/long-distance private calls.

3. Eliminate “Friends & Family” Calls and Stop Paying for Private Conversations

CDR reports can also help you highlight enterprise telephony misuse and set a number of rules for your employees to limit expenses for “friends & family” calls and communications with low-value clients by:

• limiting duration of local private calls and restricting them during peak phone network load (it makes sense to call-centers especially);
• restricting long-distance private calls;
• evaluating client value and setting limits for calls to low-value ones.

In addition, if you need to control working hours of call-center employees or sales managers such facility can help you improve their productivity.

On the other hand, you can sharply decrease your telephone expenses by re-billing charges to appropriate users and user groups.

4. Allocate Call Costs to Appropriate Budgets

Hotels, motels, educational institutions, condominiums, and other entities with shared telecom services need to allocate telecom costs to corresponding departments/clients/employees.

In this case, call-accounting & IP telephony management software can help you re-bill your guests for their calls by providing them with timely information about their phone conversations. Or with such solution you can set different VoIP usage rules/limits for your students, lectures and staff and allocate costs to appropriate users/user groups, etc.

This feature also saves time of your accounting staff on daily tasks providing then with reports on expenses of each user/user group in a convenient form to process further.

If you consult your clients by phone, you can bill them for their conversations, too.

5. Bill Clients for Their Phone Conversations

If you are a lawyer, a government contractor, a psychologist or some other specialist who consults his/her clients by phone, you may be interested in a tool to bill your clients for phone charges. With CDR reports you can get complete information about your client calls (such as client phone number, date, time, length, cost) and bill your clients for their calls.

However, the above ways to cut costs for phone conversations are not the only ones out there. You can also spend less on IP telephony ownership.

4 Ways to Cut Expenses for Enterprise IPT Network Ownership and Administration

1. Save Money on IP PBX Administration

Everyday operations of an enterprise VoIP network administrator are rather simple. But the standard administrator interface is too complicated, because:

• it gives a network administrator access to advanced network settings that are excessive for everyday needs,
• accidental usage of some settings can lead to a complete system failure,
• while access to everyday operations is impeded.

Thus, you need one or even several qualified staff specialists to fulfill these chores.

An easy-to-use graphic user interface of a VoIP management system solves this problem exactly. By implementing such software, you can

• save time and money on IP PBX administration daily tasks by entrusting them to one, not necessarily highly skilled, administrator;
• improve motivation of a qualified administrator by giving him/her only the tasks that demand his/her experience and expertise.

Besides that, enterprise VoIP management software can help you streamline everyday operations of other employees, too.

Save Time on Employee Daily Communications and Increase Their Productivity

Let us consider quite a widespread situation:

• a corporate address book contains multiple mistakes (invalid data about current employees, contact information of people who have already left a company instead of new employee phone numbers, etc),
• employees waste their working time searching for the colleagues they need to talk to,
• if an employee is absent (he/she is sick, on a business trip or a vacation), his/her colleagues don’t know how to get in touch with him/her or to whom address their questions.

You can solve these challenges by adding an “Address-book” feature to your VoIP network management software and integrating it with a corporate HRM system, because:

• such integration guarantees a timely update of employee contact information (any change of user data made in HRM software automatically generates requests for changes in a corporate address book to be processed by a system administrator);
• if an employee is absent, an administrator can set up IP telephony management software to forward incoming calls to employee’s mobile phone or to his/her supervisor.

If you’ll implement an “Address-book” XML-service, actual information from your corporate address book will be available right from the employee IP phones.

Thus this approach can help you:

• reduce the time spent by employees searching for colleagues;
• increase employee productivity;
• save your expenses for wasted employee working time.

By the way, enterprise IPT management software can become your tool to save time and money on daily phone inventory tasks too.

3. Streamline Phone Inventory Management and Save Money with It

Phone inventory is a rather complicated task, especially if you need to do it for several company sites. But you can simplify it with your IPT management solution and entrust phone number and IP phone management to your IP PBX administrator, who will fulfill all operations right from his workplace.

VoIP network management software can become your convenient phone inventory tool in two ways:

• if you already use corporate inventory software, you can integrate VoIP software with it and thus provide your administrator with an access to both inventory software and appropriate databases;
• if you don’t use any inventory application, you can easily add a multi-location phone inventory feature to your IP telephony management solution.

Thus, an IP PBX administrator will be able to:

• identify available IP phones along with phone numbers and assign them to new employees;
• check and accept an IP phone when an employee leaves a company;
• update information when an IP phone is broken/repaired, changed for a new one or equipped with accessories (for example, headsets).

This, in turn, allows you to:

• manage assets at all your sites easily (for example, you will never miss an unused IP phone and buy a new one for a new employee, or you will always have a ready-to-use phone, even if your own was broken right before an important business call);
• speed-up everyday inventory tasks;
• reduce costs for phone inventory operations;
• eliminate expenses for wasted working time spent searching for missed inventory.

Architecture of an advanced enterprise VoIP network management solution allows quick and easy integration not only with a corporate inventory system, but with various components of IT infrastructure and provides you with additional benefits.

4. Remove Compatibility Restrictions and Cut Costs for Your Network Extension and Upgrade

Usually, when planning an IPT network extension or upgrade, you have to think about compatibility of used and purchased assets and choose new components of only special vendors, even though similar assets of other vendors can be no worse and essentially cheaper. To remove such restrictions you can use an IPT management solution as a mediator that integrates separate hardware and software components with custom connectors. Thus, it helps you pay essentially less for your enterprise VoIP network modernization.

To provide all the above advantages, usually, call-accounting & enterprise IP telephony network management software is developed for each company individually in strict accordance with unique business processes after thorough analysis of the existing IT infrastructure.

Further below, you can read about what kind of call accounting & enterprise IP telephony network management software was developed for one of the largest system integrators for their client - a large manufacturing enterprise.

Call-Accounting & IP Telephony Network Management Software for a Large Manufacturing Enterprise: Case Study.

One of the largest Russian system integrators AMT Group has analyzed business needs of their client – a manufacturing complex with a VoIP network built with Cisco IP phones and a number of Cisco CallManager servers, explored the current market of “out-of-the-box” software and revealed the need to develop a solution that would allow their client simultaneously to:

• manage and cut telephony expenses;
• simplify IP PBX administration;
• eliminate mistakes in corporate address book and thus speed up employee inner interactions;
• streamline IP phone inventory processes;
• cut costs for VoIP network extension and upgrade with custom connectors that integrate IT infrastructure components.

As AMT Group didn’t have sufficient expertise in building IP telephony applications, their trusted BCS-IT with custom development of the needed software. BCS-IT built call-accounting & enterprise IP telephony network management software that satisfied all the client’s requirements exactly by providing him with the described above means to effectively manage expenses for paid calls and pay less for VoIP network administration and ownership. In particular, they developed

• custom connectors to enterprise IP PBX, HRM-software and an accounting system to:
  • streamline user management and exclude mistakes in the corporate address book,
  • speed up everyday tasks of the accounting staff,
  • provide multi-vendor support and simplify IPT network upgrade and extension;
• an easy-to-use multi-location phone inventory tool to
  • provide timely information about availability of the necessary items at any client’s site;
  • manage phones: receive a new asset and input in corporate inventory database the most important data about it (serial, model, MAC, date of purchase), assign a phone to a user, send a broken asset to a repair service, etc.;
• an easy-to-use administrator interface to
  • manage phone numbers and do inventory with above tool,
  • set and manage limits of expenses on paid calls,
  • find corporate HRM and inventory information in a blink of an eye with built-in search engine.

Successful implementation of this solution proved to help the large manufacturing enterprise:

• completely control, manage and decrease expenses for paid calls;
• speed up inner employee communications and cut costs for employee wasted working time spent searching for an appropriate colleague;
• save time and money on IP PBX administration daily tasks;
• control IP phone inventory processes at all the company sites;
• control an IP PBX administrator actions with a log history auditing facility;
• process up to 100 helpdesk requests simultaneously and up to 50 000 calls per day;
• extend and upgrade IT infrastructure without excessive costs with easy and quick integration of software/hardware components from different vendors (with developed connectors to Cisco CallManager 4.1, Avaya PBX, corporate HRM, inventory and accounting software).

Your Next Steps to Improve Your VoIP Network Efficiency

By solving lots of business problems with implementation of an enterprise VoIP network, you can do even more with a right solution to increase its efficiency. The choice of an appropriate solution, first of all, depends on your business. As an example, let us consider two opposite cases:

• if you need to manage several dozens of call-center operators making/receiving thousands of external calls each day, than your main challenge is to control their conversations and cut costs for unnecessary calls that you can do with appropriate call-accounting software;
• if you wish to improve the efficiency of an IPT network of a large manufacturing enterprise that contains several thousands of IP phones located at multiple sites and your employee communications are mainly internal, than you need an advanced solution to optimize your VoIP network management and save money on daily administration tasks and pay less for its ownership.

Modern market of “out-of-the-box” software contains lots of excellent call-accounting applications and VoIP management solutions. So you can probably find an appropriate existing system to solve your standard problem.

However, if your problem is unique and you can't find a available solution on the market or if you wish to solve several challenges simultaneously and don’t pay for excessive facilities, you can

• customize “out-of-the-box” software and integrate it in your existing IT infrastructure;
• develop unique VoIP software to completely satisfy your business needs and solve your problems exactly.

If you want to learn more about

• business advantages that you can get with extending functionality of your enterprise VoIP network;
• benefits of custom application and XML service development;
• how to choose a reliable and experienced partner to build the right software solution for you,

you can find useful information in the e-book “The Connected Enterprise: Unleash the True Potential of Your Enterprise VoIP”.

If you'd like to

• eliminate expenses for unnecessary calls;
• improve the efficiency of your existing IP telephony network;
• pay less for its administration, ownership, extension and upgrade,

please, contact us to get the specification of the product developed by BCS-IT or a detailed technical proposal for your custom solution.

Download the whitepaper (PDF, 313Kb) to share it with your colleagues.

About BCS-IT

You can feel confident that you will get quality software from BCS-IT, because:

• the developer team has extensive experience in building custom
  • call management and call distribution software,
  • queue management solutions,
  • enterprise address books,
  • call reporting applications,
  • IP audio/video conferencing software,
  • call recording applications,
  • IP telephony network management software and
  • many other custom solutions for enterprise IP telephony;
• a mature development process and rigorous QA control guarantee that you get
  • high quality software
  • software right on time and within your budget
• you work with people, who understand your business needs, goals and processes;
• you can get software of any complexity, because the BCS-IT team has a lot of software development experience, great skills and versatile education.

Learn how you can use our skills and experience to get excellent results in your business.

Contact us to learn how we can help you reduce your enterprise IP telephony costs with quality VoIP software.