and not just limited to telecom. A sales management application does sales planning, sales development, and sales reporting. Based on sales data, sales planning mainly involves predicting the sales figures and demand for a prod- uct. Sales planning will improve business efficiency and bring in focused and coordinated activity within the sales process. As part of sales development, the sales activities performed are tracked. All incomplete activities are worked to completion. History information is ana- lyzed to bring in continuous sales development. Sales reports are generated to check operational efficiency of the sales process and to ensure that the results set forth in sales planning are achieved. 20. Customer contact management: These applications ensure effective com- munication with the customer and are usually slated as customer relation- ship management solutions. A contact management solution usually has an integrated call-tracking system that provided up-to-the-minute information on the status of customer calls. This helps to check the quality in handling customer calls based on records generated and feedback collected from the customer. To maintain customer communication data, a centralized database is implemented with contact management solutions with the ability to support multiple communication channels. Customer contact management solutions are usually used at the service provider help desk, which can be dedicated call/ contact centers. Some contact center solutions can do intelligent call routing. For example, when a customer calls with regard to a specific service, the con- tact management solution tries to find the exact customer query. This is done by requesting the customer to make a selection from a set of options. After multiple selections are made by the customer, the solution either routes the call to the appropriate help desk or automatically checks customer account details to provide a response. 21. Interparty management: These solutions are used by the service provider to settle charges