If you are interested in mobile strategy because your job requires you to be then this topic will be of special interest to you: lowering your carrier fees.
We haven’t spent the time to provide you a step-by-step methodology where we walk you through a detailed process on how to analyze and potentially lower your enterprise carrier fees… But for now these are just a couple of notes and things to consider. If there is enough demand we can provide a more thorough approach.
- Take Inventory: First you need to know what you have and how much you are paying for it. Depending on your organization this might be a painful exercise but the easiest way of starting this is by collecting your wireless phone bills. It may seem like an obvious step to you but there are many organizations that don’t handle these expenses in a centralized fashion (or through one single department/person).
- Usage Patterns: Numbers always tell a story. Look for both voice and data usage patterns as well as local, regional roaming and international usage. Very quickly you may begin to see some interesting patterns developing that allow you to make some distinct user groups. (For this part of the analysis and to save you some effort you can take a representative subset of users and their corresponding bills.)
- User Groups: Sometimes known as user profiling or user segmentation these groups tend to ‘fall out of’ the above analysis naturally. Some criteria to help you place your users into groups:
- Local versus roaming versus international voice and data usage.
- Desk versus road versus campus users.
- Mobile applications used (depending on your budget situation you may want to distinguish between those required applications and those nice-to have ones).
- Hierarchy… Don’t want to mention it … you will most likely have to create a special VIP group with no limits
- Analysis: Just look at the data…
- What can you do with it?
- What jumps at you?
- How many users would benefit from a different plan? (Most of the time this is where your biggest savings come from… placing people under the right plan to eliminate overage charges).
- How much are you paying on overages?
- What seems to be important to your users?
- Priority List: Once you have done all this work you need to sit down (include some representative end users) and make a list of what is important to your organization and of any service failures from your carriers in the past. You need to know both what you want and what leverage points you have before you approach the carrier for a deal.
Now you sit down with the different carriers and explain to them what you need and that you need to save money on your bills. Of course how much leverage you have will depend on how many users you have. You need to be proactive and go after savings wherever you find them – it will be good for your organization and for your career.
A few other things to remember and on which you should find out what the carrier is willing to give you:
- Device refresh cycles
- Overage penalties
- Pooling of minutes
- Warranties and repairs
- If your organization is large enough you may ask to bypass Tier 1 support (which is typically not very good anyways) and to go directly to the more senior reps.
And remember – only you are looking after your organization’s best interests. That’s what you get paid for… while other people get paid by selling services to you.
Note #1:This is not a very in depth approach but is meant to get you started…
Note #2: A cursory search on this topic only found this article by eWeek on How To Save On Your Enterprise Wireless Expenses. But I am sure there is a lot more out there. If you have written anything on this topic please place the link in the comments and we will add it to the post… or if you have any comments whatsoever please join the conversation.
Similar Posts:
- Making Sense of Mobile Application Development
- More Mobility … Less Budget
- Moving Beyond Wireless Enablement (Canada)
- Collection of tiny mobile apps for your iPhone (or my Personalized Enterprise Gateway)
- Mobile Strategy Basics
- Content On Its Way
- iPhone and Enterprise Mobility
- Enterprise Mobility – one or many device manufacturers?
- Mobile Advertising and Productivity
- 13 Things To Remember When Integrating Mobility (Or How To Avoid Process Peddlers)
{ 4 trackbacks }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
With most companies using a middle ware (BES, SCMDM, etc) product for their mobile environment, there is an opportunity to work with IT folks to create policies which control data hungry applications. As manufacturers release device with multiple radio, there should also be an opportunity to develop a least cost approach to data usage, for example, permitting high-volume data applications on WiFi, but disabling them on cellular.
Great points CAS. Take for example campus based repair technicians using a Help Desk application… They could go use it solely on Wifi and never need to incur any data costs for that particular application. There would be many scenarios that could benefit from your suggestion.