Hotline IT provides telecommunications services and a full suite of IT services and support to customers across Australia and New Zealand. By integrating Datagate’s telecom billing software with ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Agreements, Hotline IT now automatically sends telecom bills through each customer’s ConnectWise Agreement.
Hotline IT views a summary of telecoms charges inside ConnectWise, so staff only need to log into a single system. The company is developing a customer portal to give customers direct access to historical call data so that they can self-serve.
Hotline IT CEO Michelle Joosse says her company is using Datagate to automate the uploading of large amounts of data into ConnectWise Manage and ConnectWise Agreements.
“We now automatically send accurate, detailed telecoms invoices,” she says.
“We were previously having to manually key information into ConnectWise. As there was so much data, we’d only key in an overview. Datagate puts a summary of call data into ConnectWise, broken down into individual customer sites so customers can easily apportion out their costs to the relevant sites. Our customers are hungry for detail, they want to analyse call costs and apportion them to cost centres. We provide customers with that detail in a highly professional format that reflects on the quality of our systems and services.”
Hotline IT has a portal for internal use which it uses to track ‘everything,’ says Michelle Joosse.
“We are moving to offer a self-service end-customer portal which will deliver a customised view.”
Creating space for growth
Nimisha Kalimuthu, Hotline IT’s Finance and Administration Manager
Hotline IT used to have to create manual records, using the CDRs (Call Data Records) received in CSV format from its telecom carrier, says Nimisha Kalimuthu, Hotline IT’s Finance and Administration Manager.
“It was very difficult to send bills out in a timely way, and we couldn’t present much information to customers as it was not in a friendly format,” she says.
“Now Datagate uploads the CDR data straight into ConnectWise and gives us a report of any exceptions,” she says.
“The ConnectWise customer field synchs across to Datagate and automatically creates a customer record. In the Datagate portal I can then see the customer, and check all the information there. There should be no errors because it pulls information from the API into the system. If the API is right the information is right.”
Any call changes come though automatically.
“You can choose to delete old records or keep the entire history there. It’s very powerful. We don’t have to enter any numbers into the system,” Nimisha Kalimuthu says.
Hotline IT is free to grow. “Datagate has reduced the strain on our accounts team and freed up time,” Nimisha says. “It will take me around the same time to bill five times as many customers.”
Hotline IT will use Datagate ‘wherever we need to get lots of data into the ConnectWise system,’ Michelle Joosse says.
“We offer extended hardware warranties for example. Some of our customer have hundreds of sites, so their warranties change every month. We will use Datagate to automate the uploading of all that information into ConnectWise, where we can easily view, invoice and report on it in detail.”
