Corporate Telecoms Costs – Can You Help?

Issues Affecting the Corporate Market

As featured in Comms Business – October 2008

As a reseller or service provider your larger Corporate target customers are facing a myriad of issues affecting their telecoms costs. Consider these large telecoms estates, with multiple sites with lots of fixed lines, plenty of home workers, each with a mobile, perhaps a Blackberry and a laptop. It starts to get complicated and many Corporates don’t have the resource, time or budget to manage these costs.

This can be for many reasons such as a lack of telecoms usage policy. Or other more pressing IT issues that are considered higher priority. A general in house ignorance to existing telecoms models can contribute. As can a blinkered view on cost cutting and not the management of these costs.

Aurora Kendrick James recently commissioned a report by Quocirca looking at how telecoms are managed by the Corporate market. In one question with regards to where Corporates would look for information and guidance in the management of their telecoms needs, over 80% said they would look to their current suppliers. This is alarming as American analysis firm Gartner report “12% to 20% of telecom charges are in error and 85% of errors are in the carrier’s favour.” Tariff verification and validation of costs may be a key component in the reseller’s value add portfolio.

Consider those companies with a top annual spend of £1m are also limited by the tools and technology at their disposal. The report generally outlined a poor understanding of the communications market with regards to tariffs, handsets, capability and services available.

We’ve all been in a position where we’ve been assigned to the wrong tariff, hopefully not many of us have been shocked with a £10,000 bill for one month’s usage because we were unsure about our roaming rights. However this is the reality and the chances of this being overlooked if your clients are not checking their bills is extremely high.

Couple this lack of bill checking with an ever increasing pool of smart phones with access to many different services, is it clear to your clients which member of staff should be on which tariff? Are there policies in place to help cut personal usage? If so are they able to tell you how many people called in to ‘I’m A Desperate Celeb, Get Me Out Of Here’ at their expense?

Another area that the independent report covered was visibility. This covers who uses what, how often, where there are calling patterns and where savings could be made. Transparency can give your clients the control they need which in turn will influence the importance of usage policies. This is where you can help your clients to stay in control. This will help them focus on investing in new services whilst managing out legacy charges.

When asked about priorities for telecoms spending, only 30% of those questioned highlighted increasing visibility as a priority with over 60% saying that reducing costs is more important. What that vast majority fail to realise though is that it is the visibility that allows them to make continuous cost savings.

More than half of the companies interviewed admitted to not consistently receiving fully itemised electronic bills which is essential to highlighting employee behavioral usage.

Education, visibility and proactivity are key elements to establishing a partnering relationship with your corporate customer. As the pressure grows on budget holders to make decisions and implement new solutions, enabling your account team to build that trust with the customer will be vitally important to long term account development.

Helping to manage your clients costs will be an additional way of strengthening customer relationships, providing a better service, increasing profits and improving client retention. Not to mention make you look good because you have the initiative to offer a proactive service.