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Almost there. And you're probably sick of me talking about all this extra WORK I think you should do to reduce telecom expenses. But then now you know why some people give up and outsource it to a telecom audit team. But it's also why we built our new Clearview TEM software tool that we deliver via the web. It's easy to learn, not too expensive and it makes all this a whole lot easier.  But that's not what you're here to read about. So onward and upward. What's Step Five, you ask? Stepping on the smart phones. In other words - managing your wireless expenses, mobile phone management, mobile management, whatever you choose to call it. It means implementing a wireless policy. Standardize what your people can buy, what plans they can utilize, what features they have, etc. This allows you to better negotiate and track wireless costs. As your wireless device options continue to erupt, the ability to properly manage these devices and their associated costs will continue to be a challenge to all organizations. Gartner states: "Defining corporate user requirements and policy is essential for all sizes of organizations, and although every company will need a unique policy, there are key areas that every policy should contain." Wireless expense management is the current focus of most Information Technology and Telecommunication departments. To help with this task, we offer a Wireless Policy template to get you started. Stay tuned for Part Six - Talk softly but carry a big stick. Contract negotiation......
 In part four of managing your telecom costs, we talk about the Deadbeat. Not necessarily a person, but an asset. If you have phones/lines/pagers/devices that aren't being used, or are being used a whole lot less than you are paying for, then you have a problem. This is something else your telecom invoice auditing and telecom inventory management can tell you. Do you have too many phones? Too many wireless minutes? Lines that don't go anywhere? Each one you can identify is a place to SAVE on your telecom costs. Shut them off, adjust them, merge them, whatever you need to reduce business expenses. And note that a good telecom expense management software tool can make this a whole lot easier, as it has some visibility tools that take the work off your eyeballs. Next up in managing telecom costs? A good wireless policy. In other words, learning to say "NO".
As we discussed yesterday, in Plugging the Hole Part One - the main challenge of telecom expense manaegment is to get all your data in one place so you can actually see what you're doing. Whether you're using a spreadsheet, a box of 3 x 5 cards (which we don't recommend for obvious reasons) or a telecom expense management software designed for the job, you need to figure out WHAT to put in there. WHAT do I have to keep track of to make this work?  Well, first and foremost is inventory. What do you have? And this is critical, as your telecom invoice auditing depends on knowing what you have so you know what to pay for. The POTS lines sitting around on desks, the smart phones riding around in your salespeople's pockets and the hefty data plans that go with them, pagers, cell phones, circuits.... all of it. Get it down and get it allocated by GL code so you not only know what you have, but who is responsible for it and who's gonna pay for it! Next up? Auditing - figuring out if you are actually paying for what you think you're paying for.... Stay tuned.
 Since the break-up of the Bell companies in the early 80s, there have been many new complex telecom technologies, services and plans and a variety of telecom providers that have entered the telecom space. With these complexities, come opportunities as well as threats for telecom users. One of the threats that has come with divestiture has been inaccurate billing, usually caused by the use of legacy billing systems designed to handle a basic, simple mix of circuits and services, and utilizing codes that were developed by the Bell companies around those services.
As more complex, negotiated rates and services have come about with more competition, there is a propensity for errors in data entry of contracted rates and for legacy billing systems to apply the inappropriate charge, most in favor of the telecom supplier. To make matters worse, in the past 20 years, there have been numerous mergers and acquisitions among telecom vendors requiring the merging of disparate billing systems. This has dramatically exacerbated the problem.
Telecom users in North America spend a significant amount of money on telecom services and equipment. Telecom services are defined as “fixed”(also known as “wired” or “wireline”) including local, long distance/800, conference calling, wide area network (WAN) and internet; and “wireless” including cellular, blackberries, PDAs, smart phones and pagers. According to Forrester, “typically 3% to 6% of an enterprise’s gross revenues are spent on telecom services with 72% of the average North American enterprise telecom services’ budget spent on landline and 28% on wireless services.”
These companies are challenged with the management of carrier billing that is complex and fraught with errors. Forrester estimates that “billing errors average 5% to 12% of ongoing telecom services budgets.” In addition, during the past 20 years of auditing telecom invoices, Valicom has found that over 35% of invoices have some type of error, discrepancy or overcharge in them. Based on this, it is prudent to err on the side of caution when auditing your telecom invoices.
To learn more about the best approaches to performing telecom audits and expense management functions for your organization, read Valicom's whitepaper entitled "Can TEM SaaS Solutions Lower Your Telecom Expenses For Mid-Market Companies?" OR go this link to download a streaming vido of the webinar sponsored by Valicom about this topic.
A recent issue of The Economist, the venerable British business publication, discussed the advancing threats from cyberwarfare. As if IT people don't have enough to worry about, it had some interesting statistics about infected computers out there on the international grid. Even here at home, with our higher security standards, millions of US machines are infected with something, creating mass sleeper botnets. Botnets that nasties from overseas can use to unleash chaos on our power grids, financial databases and just about anything we rely on that's delivered via the internet. Here's an interesting image that shows the distribution of infected machines. (see the whole earth map image in the article, I just included US & Europe)
 As the article says "The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security. Yet in wiring together the globe, it has merged the garden and the wilderness. No passport is required in cyberspace. And although police are constrained by national borders, criminals roam free... Enemy states are no longer on the other side of the ocean, but just behind the firewall. The ill-intentioned can mask their identity and location, impersonate others and con their way into the buildings that hold the digitised wealth of the electronic age: money, personal data and intellectual property."Most of this digital mayhem is wrought through malware. Lots and lots of malware. Something you need to keep OFF your employees computers, wireless and mobile devices, part of which means having a good wireless policy and a mobile management plan in place. Malware can infect a smartphone almost as easily as a dekstop PC. Here's an alarming graph of the growth of malware...  The article goes on to discuss how different governments, the US included, are amassing an army of cyberhackers to both defend our national IT infrastructure - and attack, should the need arise. I think it's an interesting discussion, because we all know that one of IT's main concerns has always been security. (and if it's not, it should be) And I feel that the services we deliver play a part in that. By implementing strong telecom expense control, it frees up IT resources for other areas, like security and business continuity. A solid telecom inventory management solution also helps keep track of everything you have, so you can identify unused or underused machines and phones, removing them from your hardware pool before they become a problem. And if you're not really sure whether you have a "tight ship" or not, maybe you need to reach out for some help. A telecom audit can usually identify 30% savings or more in your annual telecom budget. Renegotiate some contracts, get a good handle on your inventory, and then you'll really know what you have to secure. To read the rest of the Economist article, click here.
Kick the Tires, Honk the Horn, won't cost you a thing....
 We know that you'd never buy a car without checking it out, looking under the hood and taking a test drive. And while Valicom, with our twenty year history and record client satisfaction scores, isn't exactly "Honest Al" over at the local car lot, we'd still like to offer you the same courtesy. In February, we led the TEM industry by releasing our third-generation telecom audit platform Clearview as a Software-as-a-Solution (Saas), giving small to mid-sized businesses a new tool to reduce telecom expenses. It can also be used by telecom expense reduction analysts or telecom consultants to help them deliver results. Now we've made it even easier to try out Clearview by launching a short online demo, so you can see just what you're missing. And Clearview is designed to do just that - give you a " clear view" of your telecom spend. Delivered securely online, it allows you to review your telecom invoices for errors, see wireless expenses - like mobiles phones and data plans, organize all your telecom assets in one place, track changes, additions or deletions, and in general make order from chaos. And in doing so, you'll save TIME and MONEY, which is really the whole point. So if you'd like to take a test drive of Clearview, just head on over to our website and we'll give you the keys....
Just had to write quick about this one thing..... I'll be quick. Promise. Telecom managers out there? Please take the time to review your vendor remit addresses. And please take the time to issue one check per account. Meaning, even though you may have 5 or 50 account invoices from a single vendor, and you're tempted to pay for all those accounts with one check, don't do it! Cut one check for each individual invoice, and I'll tell you why... Today I spent hours on the phone with a vendor - we'll call them "AT&T" for this purpose - straightening out a huge mess. Valicom recently took over bill payment for a client, so I pulled some reports and noticed that several invoice payments appeared to be missing. I called the client and asked if they had paid these invoices before Valicom took over. "Yes, Paid!" said my client, "Let me send you a copy of the cleared check." Check. Singular. Uh oh. I knew right away what had probably happened, so I called the vendor to confirm my suspicions... Sure enough, I was right. "AT&T" applied the entire payment to the first account number, leaving off payment of 30 other accounts. The result was a swarm of disconnection notices, late payment fees, interest on late payment fees and a very large credit resting on the overpaid account. One would think common sense would prevail in situations like this, but no. One would also think it very easy to correct this misbilling. Also not so. Not only did I spend hours talking to the good folks at the vendor, but I'll have to track every payment for awhile looking for the billing to be corrected, late payments to be refunded and make sure the credit is reversed. So it will take at least one billing cycle for this all to be working properly again, maybe longer. I'm guessing if you're reading this post, you're probably not in your company's A/P department. Maybe you're in IT/Telecom and would be working with someone in your billing department on a fiasco like this. That means double the labor to find a resolution, and then the additional task of monitoring the situation for over a month. Probably not the best use of your time! So make sure your Telecom Expense Reduction Analysts take the time to carefully audit each and every telecom invoice - to maximize your expense reduction - and then cut the checks ONE per invoice. The goal is to match Apples to Apples so the dollar amounts add up.... and the account numbers match, and the payments get applied right, etc etc etc... Otherwise, next time, this might be YOUR mess.... (Pssst - Need a good tool to help you manage your telecom expenses and telecom invoice payments? Try out Clearview... Even if you're doing it in-house, at least be sure you're doing it right!) - ST
Walking around here on a Monday morning, the passion that our telecom audit teams have for their job may not be immediately apparent. But quarter after quarter, Valicom surveys our clients, and finds an increased level of satisfaction with our ability to reduce telecom expenses. We have hit a record 3.79 score, as shown in our latest press release. However, this wouldn’t come as a surprise, if you knew our project management people. They don’t just care about wireless expense management or telecom invoice auditing, they care about the person on the other end of the phone. We’re here to solve problems for our clients, whether through our telecom management outsourcing, or via our new Clearview software-as-a-service. And that attitude IS apparent when you discuss day-to-day operations with our team members. You hear about projects and problems, true, but also about personalities. It’s obvious that there is a deep connection with our clients, a desire to help them do their jobs. We know that our key deliverables are cost reduction and expense management. We can save our clients money, resources and time, and that is increasingly important in the current rough economic climate. That good feeling - knowing that we are helping them make better business decisions and strengthening their bottom line - makes it worth getting up in the morning. Read more in our latest press release - Valicom Reports a Continued Increase in Customer Satisfaction Scores.
At Valicom, we are always looking for ways to reduce telecom expenses, increase operational efficiencies and minimize risk for our clients. I just read an article from WTN News about textblockers that prevent drivers from utilizing their cell phones or texting while driving. With the statistics regarding the number of accidents and fatalities caused by texting and cell phone use while driving, this may not be a bad idea not only for parents, but for employers to reduce your liability risk and protect your valued staff. It is not only wise to include a provision in your wireless policy that prohibits the use of employee's wireless devices while driving but to also consider ways to reduce risk by considering the use of these new cell phone apps.  The new category of text blockers include apps like iZup, tXtBlocker, CellSafety and ZoomSafer. This wireless management software uses the GPS on your cell phone or blackberry to calculate the driver's speed. Once it detects that you are going more than 10 miles an hour, it determines that you are driving and shuts down your device until you are no longer moving. Some of these apps allow cell phone calls but block text, e-mail, Web, chat, Facebook etc. Passengers can unblock their phones by solving a timed puzzle that could not be addressed in a timely manner by the driver. One consideration is whether you, as an employer, want to play Big Brother to your employees or demonstrate trust that they will not text (or talk) and drive on company time. This is dependent on your company culture and should be in keeping with other policies pertaining to the use of cell phones, computers, vehicles etc. As part of an overall wireless expense management engagement, Valicom reviews not only wireless policies and strategies but also performs cell phone audits and on-going wireless optimization services to reduce business costs. In addition, by utilizing Clearview's mobile expense software module, we perform full lifecycle services such as telecom asset management, comprehensive reporting and bill payment. To learn more about the benefits of our wireless expense management services, check out our web-site at www.valicomcorp.com.
- Sitting at a stop sign on my way to work the other morning, I quick grabbed my Blackberry and opened a new email.
The email was from a client from a large Broadcasting company. She simply asked for a copy of an invoice to be emailed back to her. Most respondents of the email might simply honor the request and send the invoice back to the requestor. End of story. Everybody's happy. Not me. The request nagged by brain for the rest of the way to work. WHY did she want a copy of the invoice? I felt like I was missing something; a bigger opportunity to help. I called my client when I arrived at work and sure enough - there was a great deal more to the story. What she really needed was some reporting. In great detail, she explained the project she had been given a week to finish. I could tell she dreaded the data compilation that was going to take her and her co-worker hours to put together. These are the phone conversations I have several times a day. I'm always thrilled when I am giving the opportunity to really get to the heart of a client's issue and provide a same-day solution. Enter Valicom's Clearview Telecom auditing software! I was able to log in quickly, and within minutes - pull the data she needed to finish her project. The best part was her response when she recieved the reporting from me. "Oh my gosh, you just saved us at least five hours of digging!" By the way, not only did we save our client's valuable time - but we also helped with Telecom Cost Management as the reporting allowed the company to make some very informed business decisions as it related to their cellular expense. It was my pleasure.
A rewarding day for me.... During the auditing of an invoice for one of my newer clients, I spotted an nxx (exchange) number that I did not recognize as part of their inventory. After a very short while, you begin to memorize your client's Telecom stats. Digging further, I found it was a fax line with a fair amount of usage. Digging even deeper still, I found this particular fax number had been billing since 2005 and that my client had been diligently paying for this line each month; never questioning it's presence. It was a fairly large invoice, and I knew it probably hadn't been audited in a long while; it's so easy to miss one little line item. I called the vendor and was told this invoice was billing correctly..... I pushed back, knowing it wasn't billing correctly. I was informed that all the ordering paperword was on file - signed and dated. I requested the paperwork, and a now very irritated vendor representative finally sends it my way only after I apply some kind Telecom vendor management..... Now we're getting somewhere! After reviewing the paperwork, I immediately noted that not only was this line being billed to my client in error, but that it was supposed to be billing to a competitor in a the same field using a similar name! When I called my client to report my findings, he started howling with laughter - very pleased, indeed. Apparently, this particular competitor had not been playing nice in the sandbox. I informed my client of the credit his business would be getting. " HOW MUCH?! That is AWESOME!" he yells. Now he's giddy and I can practically hear him dancing around his office - over the phone lines.... He's calling people in to his office to tell them and excuses himself from the call. (I can't tell you the details here, but while the credit was very nice - the annonymous "poke back" to the not-so-nice competitor was probably just as sweet. <wink>) Later in the day, I get a "thank you" email and request for numbers and full accounting so that he can report this to his peers in upper management. I'm all too happy to comply. This is the positive impact I strive to make every day. I smile, because I was just doing a job I love for a client I feel really fortunate to serve. Who is looking out for you? Did anyone make you dance around your office in celebration after providing Telecom expense reduction numbers? Client service and support at its finest! No? Let's talk!
Mind your features! Opening my personal cellular bill recently resulted in unexpected and unpleasant surprises. You see, I have twin 17-year-old daughters whom, like their mother, love technology…especially their new smart phones with all the bells and whistles. I did not caution them about price point cons for the games, ring tones, data downloads, music, wallpaper, etc. Big mistake. Even worse, I underestimated the amount of texting two teenage girls could amass in one month. Astounding and expensive. I should have told them to mind their features!
You probably see where I'm going with this. You may be responsible for 300 or 1000 cell phones and need to manage texting overages, cute puppy wallpapers purchased, and AC/DC ring tones blissfully downloaded. But, do you really have the time? I’m betting you don’t, so the potential savings go right down the drain each month. Of course, you have company policies in place that spell out allowed features but many employees can't resist the temptation of the VZ Navigator download or they simply either don't understand or choose to ignore their own corporate cell phone plan’s accepted features and limitations. Who has the time to peruse a 500-page cell phone invoice? Who has the time to follow-up on every identified issue from one month to the next?
Here are a few tips for business wireless cost-reduction strategies: - Start by monitoring the monthly invoice dollar amounts. Huge overages should catch your attention but what about the more subtle increases? Trust me, they add up quickly and can ruin your projected annual budget.
- Make the simple change to electronic billing to take advantage of the robust reporting capabilities most carriers offer on-line. Set up your account and navigate your way through the vendor's on-line portal and you'll find a wealth of information at your fingertips: equipment charges, overages, plan information, everything you'll need to effectively audit your invoices.
- Another solution begins with your Carrier Account Manager(s). Request quarterly reporting from them and set up your own parameters so you can get the custom reporting you need. This is a time efficient way to monitor all cellular usage from your carrier.
- Another suggestion, and my personal favorite, is to hire your own telecom expense management firm. They are trained professionals who take care of all the heavy lifting, follow-up, and nagging telecom annoyances you don't have time to take care of yourself. Find a telecom expense management firm who will work with you for a productive partnership and flexible fit.
Just a few easy ways to manage your business cellular expenses, saving you from the dreaded unpleasant surprise of overages, add-on’s, and everything in between.
Businesses live this everyday and do not even realize it. Especially, when it comes to true telecom expense control. Albert Einstein once said "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Think about this quote for a second and ask yourself if this quote applies to the way you run your company. Does this apply to the way you run telecom expenses? When was the last time you actually performed a telecom audit? If you are manually auditing telecom invoices and manually attempting to interpret your wireless or cell phone charges then you too could join the insanity club.
Knowing how much time your organization spends on telecom expense management activities is the first step in being able to reduce telecom expenses. Wouldn't it be refreshing to have automated telecom auditing that takes industry best practices and proactively alerts you directly to a billing issue or cost savings opportunity? Being aware of your options is half the battle and will keep you OUT of the insanity club.
By Sandy Thompson I have seen more organizations auditing their telecom use for significant corporate cost savings which often will result in a newly revised corporate cellular policy. Opening my own personal cellular bill has often resulted in unexpected and unpleasant surprises. I have twin 17 year old daughters, whom like their mother - love technology. Especially their new smart phones with all the bells and whistles. Thinking that they would not be cell phone savvy I did not caution them about the games, ring tones, data downloads, music, wallpaper, etc. Big mistake. And an even bigger mistake I under-estimated the amount of texting two teenage girls could amass in one month. It was astounding and expensive. You probably see where I'm going with this? You may be responsible for 300 or 1000 cell phones knowing you can't manage every texting overage, cute puppy wall-paper purchased, and AC/DC ring-tone blissfully downloaded. Not to mention the surprise roaming charges! Of course you have company policies in place but many employees can't resist the temptation of VZ Navigator download or they simply don't understand their own corporate cell phone plan features and limitations. Who has the time to peruse a 500 page cell phone invoice? Here is your lifeline for business wireless cost reduction strategies: - Start by monitoring the monthly invoice dollar amounts. Huge overages should catch your attention but what about the more subtle increases? Trust me, they add up quickly and can ruin your projected annual budget.
- Make the simple change to electronic billing to take advantage of the robust reporting capabilities most carriers offer on-line. Set up your account and navigate your way through the vendor's on-line portal. You'll find a wealth of information at your fingertips. Equipment charges, overages, plan information, everything you'll need to effectively audit your invoices.
- Another solution begins with your Carrier Account Manager(s). Request quarterly reporting from them and set up your own parameters so you can get the custom reporting you need. This is a routine and time-efficient way to monitor all cellular usage from your carrier.
- Another suggestion, and my personal favorite - Hire your own telecom expense management firm. They are trained professionals who take care of all the heavy lifting and the nagging telecom annoyances you don't have time to take care of yourself. Find a telecom expense management firm who will work with you for a productive partnership and flexible fit.
These are just a few easy ways to manage your business cellular expenses.
By Michael Krogman Most organizations are doing fairly regular wireless audits and telecom optimizations. Hopefully your company is automated enough to do this monthly. But those regular monthly audits and optimizations are usually only uncovering one picture... plan changes, text messaging overages, international calling, etc. But bigger issues do remain. Does everyone at your organization who has a wireless device use it or need it? Over the past two decades most organizations have gone from executives only using cell phones to almost every employee having either a cell or smart phone and many with Air cards. With budgets getting tighter there is a need to reign telecom costs back in with telecom expense management. Below are a few steps to get a telecom audit started with big savings at the finish line. - Identify Zero/Low Use Users: All wireless vendors offer basic billing summary reports that you can use to identify users who are using their device very little, or not at all. We typically recommend using a three-month accumulation of this data. These reports should be available through your corporate on-line access on your wireless vendor's website. Or you can always contact your account rep to request them.
- Locate Zero Use Users: Once you start trying to track down zero use users you'll no doubt run into a percentage of users that no longer work at the company, have lost their phone months ago, or don't ever use it as it sits in their desk. You can get those disconnected right away. The rest of the zero use users fall into two buckets. Those in bucket one need their phone and you validated that necessity. Those in bucket two you couldn't locate. Which leads us to the next step.
- Suspend: Now suspend the user lines that you were unable to track down (make sure your boss’ phone is not one of these). Those people who did need their device will holler at you for sure and it's usually quick and painless to get their phone active again. Those who don't make noise we'll assume they didn't' need it and this adds more to your telecom savings.
- Low Use: Dealing with the low use users can be trickier. Talk to department heads or managers about reducing wireless costs. And by getting user reporting in their hands usually can motivate them to identify some of the low use users that maybe don’t need their device at all. You may even recommend device sharing among departments to further reduce your telecom spending.
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