Three Ways Your Company Wastes Money On Wireless

Why are your company’s mobile phone bills so high? Sometimes it may be nothing more than the current market environment or regulations that allow carriers to charge premium prices, but when you dig deeper you’ll often discover that high wireless costs arise out of issues you can change for the better. Making these adjustments for a sizeable fleet of mobile phones and devices is the art of cellular telecom expense management. As companies adapt to an uncertain economic client they’re looking at communications costs more closely than ever. Consequently, professional telecom expense management services are more popular than ever.

Telecom expense management firm GILL Technologies encounters a number of common reasons for high billing. If you suspect that you’re paying too much for mobile service pay close attention to the following three situations:

Mobile Bill Errors: Major carriers like Rogers and Bell in Canada, or Sprint and AT&T in the US, have a surprisingly high rate of billing errors. A cellular expense management audit is essential – without one, it’s difficult to find savings by simply cross-referencing rates and actual charges. Telecom auditors have detected error rates as high as 30%. These are almost always excess charges. Carriers don’t apply discounts you’re entitled to, list the wrong usage for pay per minute or pay per use services, or add a surcharge that doesn’t apply to your plan.

Phones That Go Missing: Tracking a large fleet of mobile phones is a surprisingly challenging task. Handsets go missing, migrate from one employee to the next, or get upgraded to the next model. Unfortunately, there are many cases where unneeded handsets are still active and accrue monthly charges long after they’ve stopped being used for company business. Worst of all, missing or “dead” handsets may be subject to unauthorized use, leaving you the bill for fraudulent activity. A skilled telecom expense management company should be able to track your billing by unit and flag supposedly dead accounts and phones for unusual activity.

Inefficient Mobile Plans: Carriers offer attractive-looking plans because in many cases the average user won’t take advantage of all of their voice minutes, data or other features. Once you figure actual usage it may turn out that your office would have been better off on lower-volume plans that actually reflect how you use mobile communications. Just estimating based on what you hope to achieve with wireless isn’t enough; you need hard usage data. Even though you imagine a “wired” sales force who constantly use mobile email and web access to process sales, the facts on your bill may indicate a completely different usage pattern. In fact, some of the employees you assign handsets to may never use them. Once you analyze your true usage you can purchase mobile plans that fit the bill – and keep that bill to a minimum.

Studying your usage will also let you home in on your company’s heavy users or unusual patterns. Is one member of your staff using more data than anyone else? Is an employee who should be sending mobile email regularly not doing so? Answering these questions will help you enforce company policies on appropriate use and get a better idea of how wireless interacts with your business goals.