Three Ways Expense Management Can Slash Carrier Costs

Technology is supposed to solve all of our problems, but when running a business, it often feels like it causes as many headaches as it relieves. Even knowing that you’re probably overlooking areas where your business is engaged in wasteful spending.

A common culprit is in carrier contracting. You need mobile devices to get work done, but really optimizing the carrier plans is no easy feat. This is why Telecom Expense Management (TEM) exists. It’s an industry dedicated to helping businesses direct their telecom spending efficiently and effectively. Here are three easy ways of investing in TEM can save you big bucks on your carrier costs.

Unused Lines

More specifically, we could call these zero-use lines, and the name says it all. These are telecommunication lines that have absolutely no activity. That includes voice, data and any other service available on the line. Most of the time, zero-use lines emerge as a result of employee turnover. As people come and go, it’s almost inevitable for a line or two to slip through the cracks and remain active even though they aren’t in use.

Clearly, better tracking of each line is the best way to solve the problem and save money. That’s the point of TEM. It carefully watches over every communication expense, and when your TEM resources find a zero-use line, they can help you roll the line over to a new employee or cancel it. Either way, you’re cutting wasteful spending, and that’s the whole point.

Plan Bundling

You’ve seen enough ads to have an idea of this concept. When you have a bunch of lines and services from a single carrier, it makes sense to try and bundle those options to get a bulk price and save money. Considering the amount of business you bring to your carrier(s), it’s only reasonable that you should be able to negotiate some pooled plans.

The problem is that very few businesses are best served by a single pool. Employees have different requirements, so a large, uniform telecom bundle probably won’t serve the whole business very cleanly. Instead, optimizing the plans will require you to construct a potentially intricate web of lines and pools. You can see how this feeds into the first issue.

Since you’re working with such complicated optimization, why wouldn’t you want to employ sophisticated analytics to make sure you’re getting the most for your money without handicapping any employees in the process?

Extraneous Resources

For many businesses, the great enemy of reducing costs is overspending on resources. In telecommunications, that usually comes in the form of unused voice or data capacity. In concept, it’s similar to unused lines, but it’s much more difficult to track. You might think to overcome this challenge by letting each employee select their data limits, but that usually leads to overspending and waste. It’s just easy to overestimate how much data you really need.

In reality, eliminating wasteful resource spending ties back to the previous issue. You need to carefully track telecommunication usage per line, and then that information has to be fed into the contract negotiations to get the right bundle to serve every person’s needs. You see how easily this can cascade into an unsolvable equation. It’s the very nature of this issue that led to the development of TEM as an industry, and it should be obvious why TEM software and strategy can slash your carrier costs in big ways.

These three issues are among the most common that afflict virtually every business, but they aren’t the extent of what can be solved by TEM. For starters, the expense management can look at a lot more than phone lines to help you optimize spending. When you also consider that TEM can give you ROI calculations and long-term planning, there’s no question in its value. It’s worth taking the time to learn how much TEM can do for your business — improving both spending and efficacy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JEFF POIRIOR

Jeff brings 25 years of telecommunications and information technology management experience in voice and data networking, server support, and telephony and security; with a significant emphasis on customer service. Prior to joining Valicom, he was chief of the infrastructure support section for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation. Jeff was the vice president of operations for CC&N, overseeing telecommunications, help desk, data and desk side support services. Prior to that, he served as the associate director of technical resources for Covance, responsible for managing systems and network operations supporting 1700 users in Wisconsin and Virginia. He has also led data center operations at Magnetek Electric, supporting mainframe systems, client/server applications, telephony systems, and computer-aided design. Jeff holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cardinal Stritch University and a master’s degree in business administration from University of Phoenix. In addition, Jeff is a past board member of the Wisconsin Telecommunication Association.