Proteus Call Accounting for Microsoft Teams

Enghouse Interactive releases new support for businesses to manage and maintain their Teams transition

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Enghouse - Proteus Call Accounting for Microsoft Teams
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Published: August 5, 2020

Maya Middlemiss

The release of the Microsoft Call Records API has enabled Enghouse’s flagship call accounting software to extend its advanced call analytics application Proteus to MS Teams — bringing this valuable insight to existing and prospective users of Microsoft’s world-leading collaboration suite.

We spoke to Enghouse’s Head of Products, Trevor Davis, who explained that this kind of data was vital intelligence to businesses undergoing huge transformations, and facing big decisions about where and how they intend to work and collaborate in future.

“Traditionally Proteus has worked as a powerful tool for cost management, capturing every call detail from a communications platform, working out the cost for different types of call, and providing independent checks for invoice approval, as well as identify unexpected costs quickly.”

Costing complexity

Today’s suddenly distributed workforces are dealing with ever more complex challenges for communications, and comparing costs and packages from multiple suppliers has become increasingly complex, never mind evaluating the cost impact of making changes to an already intricate multi-vendor situation. “You might have a mix of hot-desking, remote working, call centre and back office”, Davis continued, “and each of these resources requires reliable communications infrastructure. For the user that might be a desk phone or a soft phone and within the network one or more gateways to bridge the enterprise network to the PSTN network and potentially on to a cloud solution like Teams. As a business manager you’ll need a reliable management tool to help manage that complexity. Additionally, when transitioning from a legacy solution to a modern unified communications platform like Teams you can’t just switch one system off and switch the other one on… Proteus can provide a very detailed and accurate snapshot on how people are using the legacy platform, so the business can make an assessment of what the effect of changing will be, and hence the change can be managed with minimal business impact.”

Trevor Davis
Trevor Davis

With the addition of MS Teams to the list of supported platforms, Proteus’ capabilities are extended, to compare the ‘apples and oranges’ on offer from different providers in a meaningful way — even to make intelligent choices within the service mix offered by one vendor.

“You can purchase just the Teams service from Microsoft, via a Microsoft 365 business plan, but Microsoft also offers calling plans in certain regions as well.” Davis explained. “In the UK, for example, there are two options for enabling PSTN calling from Teams. The first is called Direct Routing and requires a session border control to link between the enterprise, Teams and PSTN network. The advantage here is that businesses are able to choose their preferred calling plan supplier. The second option is to let Microsoft be your calling plan provider. You can even mix and match the two options. If you are feeling a bit confused by all of these choices Proteus can help out because it allows for comparisons between supplies based on your specific call records and can therefore help you decide which option best suits your business’s needs.

“As an example you could model your historic calls to different destinations, like mobile, national, or international, and then analyse and compare against different rate plans to decide which plan will be most efficient for your business going forward.”

Beyond call data

Proteus isn’t all about costs though. It provides rich analytics that support the management of a distributed workforce. Most businesses will have had measurements in place for their contact centres showing statistics such as the number of calls made per agent per day, time spent on each call, and so on, to help the business ensure consistent standards of customer service, but with staff suddenly working remotely, and likely to do so into the future, businesses need to be able to ensure that historic standards are maintained wherever people are working.

“One important statistic is call abandonment rate”, Davis pointed out, “With many contact centre staff now working from home it’s important for businesses to have visibility of this. How many people get fed up waiting and simply hang up? Your contact centre application can’t give you that information as the call hasn’t reached the contact centre at that point. Have call abandonment rates increased since lockdown and are they now under control? Have customers switched to alternative ways of contacting your business?”

“Proteus is particularly useful because it gives you a holistic view of the customers call journey and experience, from ring time, to transfers and hold time, and from the contact centre to back office”

It can also provide valuable data on productivity and HR concerns, from demotivation to overwork, by looking at staff usage patterns, and how they might have changed due to forced remote working through the health crisis. “One important metric is how much time staff now spending in meetings”, Davis concluded. “This has much more impact on their productivity than when they start and finish work each day. Just looking at start and finish time is too narrow because of all the changes we’ve had to make to our lifestyles to accommodate things like lockdown and home-schooling.”

So Proteus is clearly an essential part of the jigsaw for anyone managing teams at a distance, from their costs to their outputs — in a world where data is the new oil, then the business intelligence is fuelling the management of connected organisations of the future.

Financial ServicesMicrosoft Teams

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