Telecom Expenses in 2023 are expected to rise both for public cloud connectivity and voice/omnichannel supporting enterprises globally. Any company who has been in business for 5+ years, with multiple office locations has a 75% chance of telecom “debt” where the pricing, service, taxes, and terms are not favorable to the enterprise. This is a result of years of change and no one person solely responsible for the entire stack of connectivity. Finance owns the payables, maybe procurement while IT is responsible for the uptime, delivery, and design to support the business. The concept of using a Telecom Expense Consulting approach is not new. Using a boutique firm with deep hands-on experience customizing WAN, Voice, Call Center and Cloud Connectivity to your business only is.
4 Mistakes companies make with Telecom Expense
Mistake #1 – Install a Telecom Expense Management Software
Organizations often make a huge misstep by adding a TEM platform into their business without fully understanding the root of their OPEX issues. For example, you would not buy paper towels to clean up a water leak in a basement if you have not addressed where the source of the flooding is occurring? Macronet Services partners and recommends TEM platforms for the right use case and not every company needs one. Why? We have uncovered many TEM environments who continue the pay the wrong billing amount, overlooked increases, and have not put in a mechanism for a change in service (or cancellation).
Mistake #2 Tech Team’s Responsibility
Tech often does not have the time or desire to constantly address
Mistake #3 Not Having a System
Not having a basic system to alert when telecom services such as internet, phone lines etc. expire. Often, carriers can auto-renew services or increase pricing without warning which is part of their terms and conditions.
Mistake #4 – No Closed Loop Process
Lack of a closed loop process to avoid increase expenses. When you cancel services with a carrier, we find 24% of the time, the charges continue to bill. If the IT team cancels services but does not notify Finance who in turn does not audit future invoices
What is Telecom Expense Management?
Macronet Services Telecom Consulting Approach
We have 20 years of experience in telecom as our teams came from the carriers engineering, service delivery, billing, and analytic organizations. This tenure has helped us perfect our process for clients saving Millions annually by delivering quick analysis, recommendations and implementation of approach based on the use case.
Our Process:
Contract Assessment:
This process is the most painful for organization due to the following:
- They can’t locate the contract internally – this is common, mostly because the signer, left a copy on their PC and they are no longer with the business.
- Nobody wants to re-review the pages of language and what it means for the services procured.
- Limited understanding of what is negotiable, terms missing or added erroneously.
We have an easy solution here to obtain an original copy of your contract from each carrier through our governance process. This allows you to store it centrally with our tools yours.
Invoice Assessment
After tackling the hard part of reviewing terms, conditions withing a Master Services Agreement, auditing the invoice is next. We look for the following:
- Services Billed as ordered
- Service Locations
- Carrier Surcharges and Fees.
Tax Assessment
Often, IT organizations sign an order for services with limited understanding how, if applicable, added tax can impact the expense line. Voice and Data networks each have tax implications while others do not. This is usually dictated by the organization and how local government treats them. That’s right, some carriers are subject to tax while others are not. We will evaluate and explain if this impacts your favorably or unfavorably.
Mobile Plan Review
Mobile Expenses have become one of the more popular requests by customers due to limited understanding if they are receiving a good monthly rate or if the carriers are overcharging them. During our analysis of Mobile Phone expenses, we target:
- Mobile Plans & Rates – We say plans as many organizations use more than one mobile provider due to coverage or legacy business rules
- Employees – How often do you audit if former employees are still on your corporate plan? You are not alone if you say never.
- Data & Device Governance – Many companies lack the ability to control corporate data plans and traffic effectively. Preventing social media or other non-work-related traffic can drastically ensure your employees are not hitting overages and in right-sized plans. Also, Moves, Adds, Changes and Deletes become very easy in a single interface, we’ll show you how to request this.
Benchmark Review
Taking all the findings, we deliver a comprehensive Benchmark overview of potential upgrades while lowering costs, effective terms to negotiate and easier governance to keep expenses in line.
Studies continue to show the need to focus on Customer Experience/Journey, Accessibility to cloud resources and Security are top of mind with CIOs.