Telecom cost reduction starts with your company, not with your carrier. Savings come from understanding your current service and structuring it in a way that maximizes your flexibility. Once you have done that, you are in a better position to find and negotiate more attractive telecom pricing. Here are four strategies that can help you achieve significant savings with relatively little cost.
Understand Where You Stand
Carriers make telecom bills confusing so that a typical company cannot understand what the bill means and where they can find opportunities for savings. In the world of telecom, you don’t drink out of a MUG, an ARC isn’t part of a curve and MARC isn’t the gentleman down the hall. Confusing acronyms like these hide the minimum amount of service you’ll use and how much you will spend. The first step in telecom cost reduction is understanding your bill and your commitments. Getting a telecom audit from an expert can cut through the jargon so that you can begin to formulate a strategy.
Manage Rollovers for Flexibility
In a perfect world for a carrier, every customer would have various services with separate contracts that all roll over on different dates. Doing this makes it hard for customers to keep track of what they can re-bid and when. It also makes it extremely challenging to transition services to a different provider since the process would have to be done in a piecemeal fashion. To prevent this from happening and to maximize your opportunities for telecom cost reduction, set all of your contracts to have “coterminous” expiration dates. That way, you can move everything at once or keep them all in place and use the quantity of business to negotiate a better discount.
Fear of Commitment
Vendors love commitments because they lock you into spending money. If you know that you’re going to spend at least $2,000 per month, committing to spending $2,000 per month for 12 months might seem like a reasonable idea. However, the more you commit, and the shorter the measurement term, the less flexibility you will have. Setting your commitment annually gives you more flexibility, since it’s possible that you’d hit $24,000 in spending in less than a year. Choosing a lower commitment level — preferably less than 50 percent of what you spend — gives you even more flexibility. When you spend $2,000 per month and you commit to $10,000 per year, you should be done with the commitment after just five months and potentially free to move to another carrier.
Rebid. Rebid. Rebid.
Once you’ve structured your contracts for easy telecom cost reduction, collecting your savings becomes a matter of finding the lowest priced vendor that can provide services that are comparable, if not superior. When collecting bids, always include your current vendor since they might be willing to be particularly aggressive to retain your business. In addition, the rebidding process is also an opportunity to upgrade your communications technology. Eliminating outdated services can not only provide telecom cost reduction but also give your additional quality of service, more functionality or both.
[author_bio username=”Ken” name=”yes”]
