A TMS (or Telephone Management System) is a key requirement for business owners and managers who wish to drive the proper behaviours while efficiently using communication management strategies.
What is a Telecommunication Management System?
Typically, a TMS is a software application or web service that connects to your existing telephone system, such as data cards, cellphones and business landlines. This application enables a detailed usage and expenditure, allowing you to keep track of expenditure by department or user, and your overall telephone costs.
Why you need a TMS in your business:
A TMS encompasses many benefits for your company. Here are the most critical and important features available from a TMS:
- Monitoring of all calls including data cards, cellphones and landlines.
- Reduces telephone system abuse (expensive private calls).
- Number blocking.
- Service level assessment – including average ring times, answer times and dropped calls.
- Accurate billing and provider rates.
- Affords the opportunity to plan better, budget and other infrastructural decision making.
- Departmental usage – branches, departments and users can be monitored, which in turn allows for accurate projections and budget allocation.
- Sales representatives can be monitored on their call volumes. This includes incoming and outgoing sales related calls.
- Assistance to the business accounting of telecommunication expenses across functional and business accounting entities.
- Assistance to the on-billing of telecommunications expenses to representatives or agents.
Business generated reporting available from a TMS:
Operational reporting is crucial to ensure that planned activities and allocated budgets are managed and maintained in accordance with business goals. TMS reporting often includes the following:
- Detailed reporting by department/company, user and cost or call centres.
- Top Users – frequently dialled numbers, longest call durations inclusive of the most expensive calls made.
- Call costings (for service provider billing comparison).
- Incoming calls – call ring time and answer time.
- Any unanswered or abandoned calls.
- Weekday or weekend reporting – allows the opportunity to manage and monitor weekend versus weekday calls and success, including any after hours calls made.
- Telephone misuse – allows managers to easily identify call abuse.
- Call traffic summaries – often beneficial for planning and identifying opportunities for company wide improvement.
Telephone Management System implementation considerations:
Incorporating a TMS within your business will reduce many operational issues and ultimately afford you more time to focus on other elements. Below are some considerations before embarking on a TMS approach:
- There are different ways in which your TMS can be hosted, like:
- Onsite software, connected to your onsite PBX system
- Offsite service, connected to your onsite PBX system
- a Cloud service - you can plug in your different telecoms providers
- a Cloud service, tightly integrated to your cloud based telecoms provider
- In all, except for the last option, call rates need to be updated manually and monthly. Depending on the requirements, this can become a lengthy task; however, it is a crucial task for updated records and business cost analysis. It is impossible to do this at a high level of accuracy. Users therefore opt to use a standard rate structure, which results in inaccuracies. Records are only updated within the TMS when the program has been opened and run. Upkeep vs accuracy needs to be analysed and you need to determine whether this is important to you or your business.
- There should be no additional hardware purchases or costs when using a Cloud-based solution.
- A TMS should be a scalable solution, allowing you to upgrade as your business grows. You need to establish what is required based on the company size.
- Where physical software (on premise) installation is not needed, costs and time is saved.
- User security – permission level restrictions should be made available
- There should be no user limits on logins.
- Your TMS should have advanced reporting capability functionality.
- The TMS should act as a single system to monitor all calls from anywhere, at any time.
- Any TMS should ideally be enabled to plug into your existing PBX- , IP- or cloud systems.
Telephone Management Systems are often regarded as a complicated tool to introduce into a business but it shouldn’t be. The increasing development of cloud-based solutions offer an array of functionalities and a Premitel TMS is no exception. Get in touch with us today to discuss your telephone management service requirements and business voice solutions.