sundance-communications.com/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Simple call accounting for our DSX-160?

First, my background: I’m in charge of a small technical support group (6 people) for a small medical device company. I’m an engineer, but I don’t know much about modern phone systems.

Although we don’t have a lot of money, we just got a new DSX-160 installed at our company. I think what I’m looking for is some very simple call accounting and notification on the cheap:

(1) I’d like a simple history of incoming calls on our toll-free support line. I’d like to know how many calls we get in a day, who the calls are from, how many calls are not answered and go to voicemail, etc. I want to be able to show my boss how we’re performing and be able to justify future staff as we grow. Getting the data into a database would be good, but a flat file that I can analyze in Excel would be fine also.

(2) Although we have caller ID, I’d like to have a display of who’s calling at any given time. In addition, I’d like to have the people in my group get a notification (instant message or similar) as soon as the phone rings with info about the caller.

In addition to our main corporate number, we have a toll free line for technical support. Calls to that number ring in our area on the phones of everyone in my group.

I got the manual for our DSX-160 and educated myself about SMDR. This SMDR thing doesn’t actually look that complicated. I see from this page that if the feature is enabled, I just connect a special RJ11-to-DB9 serial cable to the serial port jack on the CPU board, I can get SMDR data. I could write a program to read serial data from the port, but I can’t find anything that shows the format of the data. Unless I have this, I could never parse it. These people did almost exactly what I'd like to do. I'm comfortable with both Perl and Linux. In the actual perl script they parse the data for their NEC NEAX 2400. However, I can't find a similar data description for our DSX. If I could, and given enough time, I think I could figure out a way to accomplish both (1) and (2) above.

Aside from turning this into a big engineering project, does anyone have any other ideas for a cheap way to accomplish (1) and (2)? Thanks so much for the help.

There are lots of Call Accounting Applications out there.

The call Accounting system we use and sell to our customers is TAPIT by Trisys (whose tech support is great). There is also CallAnalyst, which comes with a LITE version but I have never worked with CallAnalyst.

Hyperterminal will show the data, though not very usable.

You can also connect a Serial Printer, but that doesn't give you the ability to run reports.

Hope this helps!

If your looking for screen pops with customer information coming from your server the DSX is not there, you would need to upgrade to the SV8100 or UX5000

Call Analyst is good program but the only problem I have had with it is synchronization between the KSU and the PC running it. Of course this was with the Aspire but from what I can see the DSX would have the same problem. When you lose synchronization all the call data shows up with the last date and time it was synched.