Maintaining Call Control: The Importance of Centralized Call Management
Centralized call management is the ability for an organization to manage inbound and outbound calls, call routing and reporting from a centralized location. Why is this type of management important to businesses? Control.
As a small business owner it’s important to maintain control over your business. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t trust your employees, customers, vendors and others that may interact with your company. However, it is important to maintain a certain level of control and be able to monitor your call traffic, should the need arise.
The Danger of Direct Calling
With a trending emphasis towards “BYOD,” (Bring Your Own Device) it may not seem like a big deal for your sales, technical and other mobile or field staff to provide prospects, customers and vendors with their mobile number. Setting aside trust issues (I’ll assume you have great employees that you completely trust) there are other several beneficial reasons to centralize your call flow:
- Reporting – All calls that come into a centralized location (through your phone system) can be recording via a Call Log
- Call Routing – When calls come into your system, you have more control over how and when they are routed to a particular destination.
- Desk during the day, Mobile Phone while out of the office, Home or Branch Office location
- Flexibility – Remote or mobile employees have the ability to transfer calls (even from their mobile or analog phone) when the call is first routed through the company’s telephone system.
- Auditing – Of the incoming calls, how many are reaching their destination? What % are being missed altogether? These types of stats are hard, if not impossible, to gather if your contacts are calling your employees directly.
The Solution
What if you want the ability to have your sales or support team contacted directly by customers and prospects in the field? The solution is to provide individual DIDs to your employees that are routed through your telephone system and can be routed to the destination of your choice. Another benefit of this solution, is the ability to give your team a break after hours. If you have a technician on call and want all after hours support calls routed to that technician, you can route all other direct lines to your main office number or auto attendant, allowing the employees not on call the ability to disconnect from work after hours, if you wish. The real advantage is in the ability to create such options.
What about outbound calls?
Most new communication systems, both premise based and hosted, have the ability to make calls from any location by using your telephone system. That means that company calls can be made from an employee that is at home over their analog telephone. The outbound caller ID will be that of the company, keeping the home user’s number private and providing an accurate callback number for the company. Most systems have applications for mobile devices that make this process even easier, providing a separate dialing interface to complete work calls. These apps also provide direct access to system voicemail, call logs and contacts to keep mobile workers plugged into your communications system.
Empowering your employees to communicate while retaining the ability to control and manage your inbound and outbound call features and reporting is the basis of centralized call management. The capability is not very new, but is becoming increasingly simple to configure and more cost effective, even for very small businesses.