“At CTI Group, we have enjoyed dominance in the financial and public sectors with our Proteus Trader and Proteus Enterprise call accounting solutions and have worked closely with our channel partners to help them exploit these opportunities. In addition to being feature rich, both applications offer the scalability to meet the exact needs of the end user while providing a tangible return on investment.
For resellers, the most significant result of the Government’s spending review, and subsequent austerity measures, is that public sector organisations across the country will require the tools to reduce costs. Therefore, resellers need to be proactive in targeting these organisations by explaining how applications such as call accounting and call recording can provide tangible cost savings and return on investment as well as helping them to better manage their staffing resources.
A number of our public sector customers, including local government, hospitals and police forces, originally specified Proteus Enterprise to help meet their auditory requirements. However, once they understood the wider benefits of call accounting they began taking advantage of its ability to optimise their business management processes. Proteus’ standard and bespoke reports measure and analyse call traffic levels which allows department managers to deploy customer service staff levels that reflect the actual requirements. Additionally, Proteus’ carrier comparison and invoice reconciliation functionality and its ability to identify unused and unnecessary lines have provided many of our clients with significant cost savings.
Within the financial and banking sector, CTI’s Proteus Trader, which was specifically designed for these markets, is currently utilised by a majority of the financial institutions in the City of London. It is designed to simultaneously monitor voice activity across trading floors, mobile phones, PBX systems, private wires, IP links and PSTN connections. Most importantly for resellers it is engineered to be scalable, flexible and user-friendly with a simple installation and configuration process which greatly reduces the amount of human intervention required.
With the Financial Services Authority recent announcement that it plans to add mobile phone calls to its call recording regulations will lead to a number of organisations being required to implement or upgrade their existing call recording system. This provides an excellent in road for resellers to offer a proven value-add commodity to both new and existing customers.
To further enhance our portfolio, CTI Group has developed an integrated call accounting and call recording solution within a single platform. This comprises the call recording technology of our award winning SmartRecord tool embedded directly into our Proteus call accounting application. By combining the two technologies within one product we are able to offer organisations of any size a complete tele-management solution which is compatible with mobile, PBX and VoIP telephony systems.
For resellers to take full advantage of the opportunities that the integrated product can offer, it is vital that they talk proactively to their customers about the business benefits of automation through tele-management applications. Getting to know the full extent of the integrated product’s features will allow resellers to present it in a way that clearly shows how it will benefit a specific organisation. For both resellers and end-users, it has eliminated the need to specify multiple products from multiple vendors.
Finally, it is vital that resellers are prepared to speak with their PBX customers about the benefits of VoIP systems. Currently, it is in the SME market where VoIP is seeing its greatest uptake. However, its promises of lower costs and greater data information transparency will lead many mid-market and enterprise level organisations to seek out alternatives to PBX systems. As this transition occurs, if a reseller has already supplied network-based and VoIP ready value-add applications such as CTI’s SmartRecord and Proteus, an foreseen level of customer retention and higher profit margins could be the reward.”