Telecom services are a huge portion of the budget of your enterprise organization. However, it tends to be the part of the budget that no one really has a complete grasp on. Since telecom services are so crucial to your organization’s function, you know that services can be expensive, but sometimes it’s hard to grasp why your telecom costs are so high.
We’ve helped many organizations streamline and lower their overall telecom costs and can help to shed a little light on this problem.
First, to effectively run an enterprise organization requires network and telecom services that cover multiple locations, usually in different cities, states, or even countries. These services are usually contracted over time, as offices move, or as a business is acquired. When this happens, it can be easy to lose track of these different contracted services leaving your IT organization with contracts for services that are outdated, insufficient, and expensive.
Secondly, organizations can easily find themselves in situations where they are paying for services that are not installed, services that were disconnected and then never dropped off the invoice, or services they never wanted in the first place. This happens more often than you imagine. Service providers are also notorious for practices where they either bill you for services you didn’t contract for, switch you to a different service with no notice, or both.
Many enterprise organizations can also find themselves overpaying because they are not taking advantage of their purchasing power and leveraged agreements. By consolidating all of your service contracts under one master account, you can realize savings that come from realizing your true purchasing power.
Finally, most service contracts come with clauses that guarantee a certain level of service and, if that service is not delivered for any reason, they offer a credit for the time of the outage or service impairment. These are called “Service Level Agreements” or SLAs. Many organizations that experience poor service or outages are eligible for credits through their contracted SLA but most organizations that experience these impairments are not submitting for their SLA credits, leaving free money on the table.
Having it laid out in such stark terms can make you wonder how any of this could happen. But there’s a reason that telecom is the most notoriously difficult spend category in organizations. The vast majority of organizations don’t have a grasp on their contractual obligations such as when contracts expire, what exactly are the contracted services, or they can’t find contracts and aren’t even checking to see if their invoices are correct.
This leads to financial consequences for the entire enterprise. Telecom services are a place where a significant amount of money can be saved if there is an organized approach to auditing, reviewing, and researching the current telecom contracts. It can take a large amount of time, but the results are worth it.
Learn more about how you could be saving big on your telecom services.
