Todays Call Accounting environment is more competitive than ever before. To stay ahead resellers should always be seeking ways to improve their offering. Technology moves fast, sometimes in leaps, rather than incremental improvements. Sometimes a completely new modus operandi takes an industry by surprise.

Most resellers use call accounting as a sideline business, their core business is PBX. With this in mind it is clear the reseller does not have the desire to become a subject expert and therefore must rely upon the supplier for second and third level support.

Call accounting systems are notoriously difficult to maintain, there are so many environmental variables outside of the reseller's sphere of influence. Some examples are,

The PBX software does not always produce call data records in the manner expected, especially after an upgrade,

The standalone software is resident on a computer and operating system supplied by the customer of unknown serviceability.

The client may use the computer for additional tasks adding software that can interfere with the service delivery.

The system operator may have limited computer skills, or sometimes worst, be a self taught expert in all things computer.

Problems with mains power

A telephone company who delivers invoices designed to confuse so comparing call costs with the call accounting service is difficult.

This list is incomplete, but illustrates the issue.

A customer may visit the service only once per month and may discover any one of the above problems has effected the accuracy of reports for a whole month, we cannot travel backwards in time to fix it.

Because of the technicians inability to time travel, he may spend endless hours on site attempting to repair the damage with only limited success. If data is missing the reports will be inaccurate.

The problems discussed are embedded in stand alone call accounting software and there is very little a reseller can do to solve these issues. One solution would be to have a service agreement with the client with so many exclusion clauses the document becomes a worthless piece of paper.

The answer lies in providing a fully managed service, one that actively alerts the reseller when things go wrong. You as a reseller could spend a great deal of money buying such software and operating it for your clients or alternatively you could contract with a service provider who specializes in offering Software as a Service.

Stand alone Call accounting software as a product can't ever match the reliability and functionality of Software as a Service, these service providers have huge advantages in economies of scale using high level software that would not be economic in a stand alone situation.

We can conclude, the path to high levels of customer service, lower costs and increased profit for the reseller is via Software as a Service