The importance of cradle-to-grave reporting for telecom communication managers

The success of a company is often directly related to the health and performance of its communication facilities. Many companies implement call accounting software to analyze call activity, reconcile bills, track misuse/abuse, and run corporate summaries. Traditional call accounting metrics often fail to measure system performance and customer experience.

Cradle-to-grave logs can be leveraged to gather more insightful communication information, including ring time, transfers, hold time, conference, and talk time. These granular statistics allow communication administrators to maintain, adjust or update communication facilities. Most call centers would be unaware of system bottlenecks, hardware failures, and improper call handling without cradle-to-grave call accounting.

Effective use of cradle-to-grave reporting enables organizations to analyze:

call handling – By studying call history and cradle-to-grave records, communications managers determine the number of transfers, hold time, and talk time. These metrics can be tracked for each customer contact from the start to the end of a call. This ensures that the handling of all call activity can be examined and verified to meet corporate service level standards.

Quality assurance – For most businesses, it’s imperative that agents adhere to the company’s gold standards in customer service. An effective cradle to grave solution will provide a mechanism for managers to listen to call recordings and/or voice messages. This will allow them to address customer complaints, adjust corporate policies, and provide additional agent training.

Staff Administration – Skill set-based cradle-to-grave and call history reports allow communication managers to track call volumes, geographic distribution, service levels, and resolution types . This allows them to monitor efficiency and make informed decisions about staffing requirements during normal business hours, seasonal changes, and peak hours.

hardware configuration – Reviewing abandoned call frequency, ring duration, and call duration can uncover system failures, inefficient hardware configurations, and peak-hour bottlenecks. This information can be transformed into concrete decisions about hardware performance and migration strategies.

A seasoned unified communications management solution must address the comprehensive needs of communications administrators. A robust application that includes Cradle-to-grave analytics, historical call center reports, call recordings and voicemail playback, real-time queue/agent dashboard In addition to traditional call accounting, it must be implemented (on the desktop or more flexibly in the cloud). Properly tracking these metrics will maximize communications technology investments, improve customer satisfaction, and increase the bottom line.