No matter how careful your company is about controlling its telecom costs, there are usually opportunities to optimise your spending. Over time, inefficiencies in contracts and usage creep in; wastage goes unnoticed; and new tools and practices offer smarter ways to control your expenses.
In this age of digital transformation, it’s essential to ensure your team has the ICT tools they need to do the work. But every cent of inefficient or wasted spending you eliminate gives you a cent to innovate and invest in your business. Here is a guide to some ways you can potentially reduce enterprise telecoms spending without impeding productivity:
Gain visibility with cutting edge telecoms expense management practices
Before you can reduce telecom costs, constantly optimise spending and simplify administration, you need complete visibility of your baseline costs. Smarter telecom expense management processes and systems can help you to get a complete view of your entire telecoms environment, starting with a complete audit.
This includes assets such as your devices, WAN, fixed-line, and mobile voice and data costs. With these insights at your fingertips, your knowledgeable team can determine which areas of your estate contribute most to your spending. You can evaluate your business priorities and establish where you can achieve the biggest potential savings.
Eliminate redundant contracts and wasted spending
Conducting a thorough audit will empower your finance and ICT teams with the insights they need to cut costs without a negative impact on productivity. An audit will help you to eliminate existing contracts or services that are not being used and to replace expensive or underused services with smarter, more cost-efficient alternatives. It will also enable you to look for billing errors, so that you can address overbilling with your providers.
Reduce corporate-liable contracts
One step that you could consider to reduce mobile telephony costs is to reduce the number of corporate mobile voice and data contracts you have in place. Instead, you could provide your employees with an allowance for their work-related voice calls and data usage, or ask them to claim each month for their work-related expenses. Be ready to answer employees’ questions about what this might mean for their tax returns and ensure that your payroll and accounts team is prepared for the switch.
Consider a smarter BYOD strategy
BYOD policies can be an effective way of reducing device costs while improving end-user satisfaction. Rather than needing to buy a cutting edge smartphone along with a contract for each user, you could provide them a subsidy or allowance. You can also move some of the maintenance and repair costs to the end-user; training and support costs may also be lower because end-users will opt for devices they already know and love.
Empower employees to manage their own costs
Employees on corporate mobile contracts may worry about overspending, or conversely, lose track of the expenses they’re racking up. You can simplify their lives by using alerts when their bundles or running low and provide spending reports that help guide their usage. These cutting edge tools help to make users more accountable and help managers to detect possible wastage or overspending. Admins can also easily load bundles to prevent out of bundle costs.
Think about integrating smartphones with your telephony system
In today’s hybrid working environment, employees aren’t always working from their desks in your campus. Most modern cloud-based telephony services or cutting edge hosted PBXs these days allow your employees to use their smartphones to take calls to their landline number. This option may enable you to avoid purchasing or replacing desktop handsets; it also makes employees reachable on a universal business number wherever they are.
You don’t need to embark on a telecom cost optimisation journey alone. At 1Nebula, our knowledgeable team of FinOps and DevOps experts has years of experience in helping enterprises to accelerate digital transformation. Contact us to learn how we can help you implement smarter cloud expense management and mobile expense management practices in your business.