Analytics and accounting of phone calls

Hello!
Our team decided to open their own corporate blog to talk about interesting products and solutions in the field of IP telephony. We hope that the published information and our services will be of interest to the IT community.

In the first article, we want to talk about the service of analytics and call accounting, which will be useful to small and medium-sized companies to assess the effectiveness of using telephony without additional installation costs.

A bit of history as a preface

We started our business as a monopoly telecom operator (telephony, Internet) in various business centers more than 10 years ago. When in the mid-2000s this business model exhausted itself (the emergence and development of alternative methods of communication, in particular IP telephony, had a particularly noticeable effect), we decided to develop not just a new VoIP line, but created a new format for the company. Today, our company, Doc.Telecom, is positioning itself as a service telecom operator who, in addition to the already classic “Virtual Office” services with direct numbers (495) or (499), combined with attractive prices for outgoing calls, provides comprehensive support and implementation of any VoIP-based services for corporate clients. Such a unique position (telecom operator + implementation / maintenance) allows us to control the entire chain of communication services and to ensure the highest possible quality of IP-telephony and minimize the time to eliminate any malfunction in case of its occurrence. We managed to break the stereotype of the leaders of many companies about the low quality of IP telephony services and show the wide possibilities of this type of services specifically for business. One of such opportunities we would like to present today to the habr-community.
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Call Accounting and Analytics

By supporting office VoIP-networks and integrating telephone services into the company's business processes, we paid attention to the problem of recording and analyzing telephone calls.

The idea of ​​creating such a service arose after numerous requests from our clients and partners to provide not only a report on calls in the form of a “sheet” of several thousand lines (almost all telecom operators do this, however, after the end of the reporting period, that is, a month later xls or csv), but at least some understanding of the cost structure of telephone services: how many calls were there, how many to mobile or long-distance, how many incoming and to which number (if there are several), missed calls, average talk time, Maximum Feed channel loading, and much more. And the most important thing is that it should be prompt and timely, and not next month.

Our company has a development department with a staff of programmers who develop various applications for VoIP solutions. They were tasked with creating a system of accounting and analytics calls. It makes no sense to talk about technical details, although it was a difficult decision to process a huge amount of data from our central servers in accordance with defined algorithms.

As a result, a unique, in our opinion, call accounting and analytics system was born, which allows you to take a look at the company's phone calls accounting from a different angle.

Main features

To begin with, we will define a circle of interested parties in such analytics:
• managers of small and medium-sized enterprises who want to see not only the total amount in a monthly bill for communication services, but also understand the structure of these costs,
• marketers, advertising specialists, SEO optimizers for evaluating the effectiveness of sales channels through telephone calls (in particular, recording calls to different numbers corresponding to the sales channel), owners of online stores,
• technical specialists to assess the load (simultaneous number of calls) on the company's telephone lines and receive recommendations on how to increase channels when the maximum values ​​are reached,
• heads of sales department for analyzing outgoing calls by directions (mobile, local, long-distance, international) in the context of each internal number (employee).

We analyze the data on calls in the following sections.

General analysis

It gives a general idea of ​​the quantitative characteristics of calls for a selected period of time: the number, duration, cost, plotted dependencies and the chart of distribution of values.

Types of calls

We group all calls by type: incoming, outgoing, call forwarding, no dialing, missed. For example, the following parameters are taken into account: quantity, cost, duration, often dialed numbers, most active clients, grouping of incoming calls for each incoming number (for example, different numbers are used for different advertising sources) and many others.


For each type, you can see more detailed statistics (for example, by incoming):

Outbound Directions

We group calls by codes: local, mobile, long-distance and international. In each group, you can track the most frequently dialed numbers and directions, the cumulative costs of priority areas for discounts and cost optimization, whether employees use personal communication for personal purposes (so-called “home calls”) and other values.


Estimation in percentage:

Loading feeds

We analyze the maximum and average number of loaded lines in order to make recommendations to increase / decrease the used communication channels, calculate the probability of dialing and answer whether an increase in staff is required to receive calls, whether the sales department has enough outgoing lines and other values ​​that directly affect efficiency customer interactions.

Internal numbers

We monitor the quantitative characteristics of employees' activities: how many calls made, how much the company spent on these calls, working time on phone calls, whether the sales plan is fulfilled, etc.

Notebook

We get a detailed analysis of a specific number or even direction. For example, you can specify the code of Voronezh and track all calls in this direction, understand the cost of outgoing calls and estimate the number of customers who call from this city. There can be several such areas of research, they can be saved and requested each time such an analyst is required.


In the future, it is planned to use a report designer so that each client can independently set the necessary research parameters and receive analysis using an individual template.

A detailed description of these sections and screenshots can be found on our website and in the presentation.

Each of the presented sections has accompanying visualization elements in the form of graphs and diagrams, which is a good visual demonstration of dry numbers.

Of course, we are working to improve our analytical reports, we are already planning new functions. And we will be happy to hear constructive suggestions and feedback from readers.

Why Doc. Telecom

Someone can compare our service with the “Target Call” service in Yandex.Metrica or other similar services, but these are completely different approaches.

Our advantages:

1. We give a complete analysis of not only incoming connections (in the case of the “Target call” of Yandex, only redirection to the existing Moscow number is provided), but also other types of calls, for example, outgoing.
2. We ourselves are a communication operator with the provision of communication services with the necessary package of licenses and permits, allocate numbers in the code (495) and (499), control the quality of the conversation in the process of providing services (for us this is the highest priority in work)
3. The speed of downloading data on calls and the formation of an analytical report - within one day,
4. We do not depend like many other services on the possible change in the format of uploading data from the central VoIP server - we install it ourselves. In general, we are not a mediator - we provide the service "first-hand",
5. If necessary, this system can be customized to meet the needs of a particular client, taking into account the specifics of his business.

This service is available to all our clients when connecting any communication services within the framework of the “Intellectual Office”.

For those who want to connect, we offer unique conditions for the habr-community (you can ask financial questions in private messages).

In order to “feel” the functionality on our own, we opened test access to the system (cost, number and duration - test values):
client.doktelecom.ru
login: test@doktelecom.ru
pass: test123

We will be happy to answer any questions in the comments, and also want to ask the community what interests him in the subject of office IP-telephony, which we could talk about in future publications.