When the phone system sells the software

Business

Pracbill

Sector

Billing software

Where

Australia

Platform

Uniden Voice over Cloud

The business

Pracbill builds billing software. Its own support and account teams spend their days on the phone to customers who are, by definition, looking at a screen full of their own data while they talk.

What was breaking

Nothing dramatic, which is precisely why this case study is useful. The phone worked. It simply had no relationship with the software the team was using during every call.

• Inbound calls arrived as a number, not as a customer. Somebody typed the number into the billing system while the caller waited.
• Call notes lived wherever the person taking them chose to put them.
• Outbound calls meant finding a number in one system and dialling it in another.
• Each of these cost perhaps twenty seconds. Across a support team across a year, it’s a substantial amount of somebody's salary.

What changed

Pracbill integrated Uniden Voice over Cloud with its billing platform, so the phone system and the software share what they know.

• The customer record comes up with the call rather than after it.
• Call records and notes sync back into the system the team already works in.
• Click to dial from the customer record, removing the retyping step entirely.
• Local support on both sides of the integration, so a problem is one conversation.

The result

The ease of integration with our billing software and great local support improved our own customer interactions and now many of our customers have made the switch.

Chris, Operations Manager

The last clause is the interesting one. Pracbill's customers saw the integrated setup while being supported by it, asked what it was, and moved to it themselves. A software company does not recommend its phone system to its own customers unless it’s confident about the support behind it.

Why it’s relevant to you

If your team retypes a phone number into another system several times a day, you’ve an integration problem rather than a phone problem, and it’s measurable. Count the calls, multiply by twenty seconds, multiply by the number of people. That’s the annual cost of not fixing it.

Other case studies

• Coco's Wealth of Health: the shop that answers the phone from anywhere
• Optical Solutions Australia: five phone systems that couldn’t call each other
• Benzina Garage: back on the air in thirty minutes

Details and quotations sourced from material published by Uniden Voice over Cloud. View the original. We’ve not independently audited the outcomes described.