In today's difficult business economy, retail businesses are under increasing pressure to reduce their costs and improve profitability.  Yet business owners and managers are often hard-pressed to know where to start cutting.  Employee wages and building rent are the two largest expenses for most businesses, but these costs are difficult to reduce.  Your employees certainly won't stay around if you slash their wages, and your landlord will be very irritable if you unilaterally decide to pay less for your space. What else can retailers do to cut their costs?

Many leading retailers save money by maximizing the value of their telephone networks.  For most businesses, telecom costs are the third largest expenditure, after employee wages and rent.  Fortunately, with the help of Veramark® call accounting and telemanagement products, telecom expenses are also among the easiest to monitor and reduce.

Here are a few common problems that plague many retail businesses:

• Customer phone calls often go unanswered when you have inadequate employee coverage, alienating customers and wasting countless sales opportunities.  What you really need is a way to make sure you are adequately staffed during peak calling hours, a way to make sure all those phone calls are answered – and answered promptly.
• Even after you spend money on advertising campaigns and promotions, calculating your advertising return on investment seems difficult if not impossible.  After each advertising campaign, you find yourself wishing you had a tool to help you know how effectively you spent that advertising money.
• Your telephone bills keep spiraling upward, getting more overwhelming with each billing cycle.  You could really use some way to get a handle on your burgeoning communications costs.
• You suspect that some of your employees are abusing their telephone privileges – tying up the phone lines for customers trying to call, ignoring customers in the store who need assistance, and unnecessarily bloating your telephone bill.  However, you hesitate to take action until you are sure.  If only you had some way to monitor your business phone usage and trace it back to each employee.

Veramark's call accounting and telemanagement products provide solutions to all those challenges:

• An incoming traffic analysis report generated by Veramark's call accounting system gives store managers the ability to staff up during times of peak call volumes so fewer calls will be missed.  As an added bonus, it also gives the telecom manager the information needed to adjust trunk capacity to match call volume.  The result?  Happier customers and fewer wasted sales opportunities.
• The incoming call distribution report can be defined to summarize call activity by location of origin.  With this report, you can gauge the effectiveness of your advertising by seeing where customer calls are coming from.  The result?  You can adjust your advertising practices as you see what works and what doesn't.
• The outgoing call distribution and the frequently called numbers reports highlight the most frequently dialed locations – information that puts you in a position to negotiate better rates with your carriers.  Exception reports, such as the longest call report and the most expensive calls report, help you detect potential areas of misuse and abuse.  The result? Lower phone bills realized by reducing your rates for necessary phone calls and putting a stop to the unnecessary ones.
• The organization report, defined to use time and cost criteria to monitor employee calls, gives you the visibility you need to keep employees from abusing their phone privileges.  The result?  Phone lines are no longer tied up unnecessarily, customers in your store get more immediate attention, and you save money on phone bills.