For resellers, there are hugely profitable business opportunities within the call accounting market. Alas, up to now, resellers have been unable to take advantage of these opportunities because of limitations in their ability to deliver service.

Resellers are not at fault, but the fact is, the average customer cannot rely on their call accounting package because of inherent service issues. The inherent maintainability of a stand alone package limits the resellers ability to perform.

Here we discuss the problems and a strategy to vitalize the industry.

Issues

There are two main problems, reliability and access to information. In a recent survey of call accounting resellers we asked the questions .

What is the total number of packages you have installed over the last 3 years?

Can you say with any certainty how many are actually collecting data today, if so how many?

Of the working packages how many correctly cost telephone calls with todays rates?

The answers we received were astonishing. Most resellers did not how many installations were working but guessed at around 70%, of those working only about half were costing telephone calls accurately. The result, only 35% of all instalaltions were fully operational.

Then we asked:

When a customer reports a fault, what is the average response time?

Generally the answer is,"'we don't view call accounting as mission critical, when we have a technician in the area with time on his hands we attend to it."

Where to from here?

We are not going to make money in this business until get serious about it. The level of service currently delivered does not impress anyone, it disappoints and devalues the business.

The root cause is the architecture of stand alone call accounting software, in most cases the reseller can't remotely communicate with it, and to deliver any service means a costly site visit.

With a stand alone system, the reseller waits for the customer to report a problem, the customer only knows something is wrong when a report doesn't work. It could have been faulty for a week or longer. Add to this the "non critical" nature of the fault and potentially we have a two week response time. Not good.

Summary

A new architecture is necessary, one that automatically detects potential problems, informs the reseller immediately they are detected by the system and provides the information to locate the root cause of the problem before the reseller leaves the office. This is Software as a Service. A new breed of call accounting service offered as an Internet application. Monitored 24/7 with up-times around 99.9% and offering the reseller enough information via the Internet to locate the cause of a problem.

Stand alone software is dead, a new opportunity arises to re-vitalize the business and offer resellers the chance to make a healthy profit. The future of call accounting lies in Web based services.