An Introduction to Call Management

Your telephone system (or PBX) produces a packet of data (a call record) after every phone call your organisation makes or receives, through it.  These call records contain important information about each call, including whether it was an incoming call, and outgoing call, or another type, such as an internal (extension to extension) call.

Call records contain details of the calling party and the called party, as well as extra information such as the length of time it took to answer the call, the duration of the call, the number that was dialled, the caller ID of the calling party, and other information, such as which telephone line (trunk) was used to carry the call.

The practice of call management involves capturing these call records, sorting and storing them in a central database, and their subsequent retrieval by way of a call management reports.

Connection to your PBX

The way those call records are collected varies between the manufacturer of your telephone system, but usually involves a physical connection using a serial cable, or over an existing TCP/IP network connection.

Serial cable connections are slightly more difficult to setup because they run at different speeds (ie. the speed at which the receiver of the call records, your PC, has to match that of your PBX, which can vary).There are also different types of physical serial connector cables, from 9-pin to 25-pin, and other proprietary interfaces using telephone handsets.

Network connections are usually much simpler to setup and involve the call management software, running on a PC on the same local area network, knowing the IP address of the PBX.  Once a connection is established successfully, the call logger liaises directly with the PBX to receive each call record as it arrives.

Traditional call management software

In the early days of call management, to obtain call reports, the operator had to physically attend the PC console and enter the parameters for each report, wait by the printer, and finally collate the reams of paper into meaningful reports.  Many call management systems still operate this way, but most now provide a web browser interface over your local area network.

Web reporting interface

Because the operator can now access reports from anywhere on the LAN using a standard web browser, it's easy to run reports on demand, send them as e-mail attachments to interested parties, or print them for inclusion in wider research.

Advanced call management systems include the facility to offer this 'web reporting interface' as part of the same product, whereas the thrifty type will rely on there being existing web server software in place, which can be an extra hidden cost in most cases.

Maintaining the call manager

Many people have invested thousands of pounds in call management systems - sometimes monitoring multiple telephone systems - but fail to keep them up-to-date.  Tariff pricing is the main cause of cost discrepancies when it comes to reconciling the call logger's reports to a phone company's telephone bill.  It's also important to update your tariffs, since these reflect network changes, such as local STD code changes and other number group changes.