Mobile bill management: How to ensure success

Transcription

1 E-Book Mobile bill management: How to ensure success Mobile telephony is a big enterprise expense, and it requires great vigilance. This expert E-Book highlights best practices for improved mobile bill management and mobile bill consolidation. Uncover practical advice and steps you can use to take control over your mobile expenses. Sponsored By:

2 E-Book Mobile bill management: How to ensure success Table of Contents Mobile bill consolidation: Making the most of managed mobility Mobile bill management: Setting attainable objectives Success in managing wireless mobile expenses Resources from Xigo Sponsored By: Page 2 of 14

3 Mobile bill consolidation: Making the most of managed mobility Did you know that each of the major wireless operators in the United States offers a bill consolidation service covering contracts that your company has with other carriers? Yes, it's true, but there's more to managing mobile than presenting a single bill. Fortunately, there are managed services to address some if not all of the pieces of the puzzle. The goal: Vendor management The carriers seldom talk about themselves as vendors, but any IT organization looks at the mobile operators as vendors that need to be managed. And mobile telephony is a big expense that requires close attention. At issue is far more than managing the cost of mobile telephony IT departments wish to deliver quality services to their users, and IT managers speak in terms of trouble tickets, service quality and issue resolution with key vendors. The day-to-day issues of vendor management can consume a lot of time and energy, and this is where managed services come into play. Bill presentation Some people like to have a single bill from which to work, and bill presentation services can give managers a single electronic file to use for audit, analysis and vendor management. We will talk further about audit in the next section, but first there is the question of how we can put thousands of subscriber accounts from half a dozen carriers onto a single stack of paper. The answer is that we aren't exactly doing that. Sure, it's one file and one stack of paper, but it's not a single billing system, and all we're doing is assembling multiple bill "images" into one place. That back-end integration between hundreds of different billing systems isn't going to happen anytime soon, and that's OK. The important thing is that we have billing information in one place so that we can audit and analyze it. And most major carriers, as well as numerous service bureaus, offer this service. Sponsored By: Page 3 of 14

4 Audit and analysis Enterprises are looking for three things in an ongoing bill audit: errors, outliers and opportunities. Errors and discrepancies take the form of over-charges, unused accounts and any other errata. Statistical outliers are usage and charges outside of a standard range. For this purpose, workers who do not use their mobile telephones are as important as their colleagues who consume thousands of mobile minutes a month. Having identified the mistakes and outliers, it is then possible for the IT organization to close unused accounts, to "pool" minutes among co-workers, and to "right size" service plans for heavy and infrequent users. A common misconception about audit programs is that they are designed to insulate the corporation from the liability of paying for expensive mobile bills. Properly implemented programs seek to identify users who routinely exceed their monthly allotments and to place these users on the appropriate plans. Companies lacking resources for a full-scale audit and analysis program may want to consider using a service bureau to handle these functions and possibly to take over vendor management functions as well. Vendor management and negotiation It's hard to believe, but there are professional services firms that will assume the full responsibility for wireless operator vendor management, contract negotiation and ongoing best practices. In addition to easing the headaches of managing mobile operators, vendor management services enable smaller companies to benefit from large-company processes such as vendor "grading" and ongoing trouble ticket and problem resolution. The combination of bill presentment, audit and analysis, and vendor management can provide companies with low-overhead mobile management approaches that will deliver predictable costs in the months and years to come. Next month, we will finish up with a discussion of mobile enterprise applications services and conclude with a best practices guide for managed mobility services. Sponsored By: Page 4 of 14

5 MOBILE EXPENSE MANAGEMENT: Now you can get 100% of what most companies need for 0% of the cost. It s Easy. It s Instant. It s Free. SIMPLE: upload your invoices, get a free report COMPREHENSIVE: 7 point savings analysis SELF-SERVICE: use it instantly, as often as you d like CLOUD-BASED: no installation, no drain on resources INSTANT: start saving time and money today FREE: what else is there to say?

6 Mobile bill management: Setting attainable objectives By Daniel Taylor Have you ever had a bill that you've been afraid to open? Perhaps you spent a lot of money while on vacation. Maybe you talked more than 900 minutes on your cell phone last month and your overage costs 35 cents a minute. Whatever it is, we all know the feeling of approach avoidance that comes with a bill that's just a little too big. That's exactly how most corporate telecom managers feel every month when the time comes to assemble the basic accounting for their companies' mobile spending. The corporate bills come in, workers submit their expense reports, and then comes the arduous task of figuring out how much the company has spent on mobile telephony. This can be a time-consuming and costly activity, and many companies find it difficult to scale the cost of managing mobile because of a lack of consistent policies, distributed purchasing decisions, and multiple bills from multiple carriers. In this first of a two-part series on mobile bill management, we'll discuss some realistic internal objectives for individuals charged with getting mobile purchasing under control. In Part 2, we'll go in greater depth into techniques for "wrestling" the proverbial alligator. Accepting our fate Part of dealing with corporate mobile purchasing is acceptance of the situation at hand. We are where we are because of the decisions that were -- or were not -- made in the past. Back when there was no policy about who could have a cell phone, workers went to the local wireless store, pulled out a credit card, and bought whatever phone and plan they wanted at the time. Some of these purchases were made on a corporate credit card, and others have been expensed every month for years. Today, there are multiple, inconsistent and overlapping policies for mobile purchasing. Field service technicians have a plan of pooled minutes purchased centrally by IT. Mid-level managers make their own purchasing decisions and expense their services each month. Sponsored By: Page 6 of 14

7 Corporate executives are issued BlackBerry devices but prefer to have separate cell phones, expenses that they put onto their corporate cards. It seems that every department has its own policies concerning mobile. Steps forward For those individuals given the impossible task of mobile bill management, the focus should be on taking steps forward in the process of managing mobile purchasing. We have all learned our lessons, and we know that there are some things that are worth the battle and other things that we simply cannot fix. What we can do is to put some structure around the money that our companies spend. The best way to do this is with well-defined and incremental forward motion. Call it "baby steps" or "moving the ball forward" the goal should be to define small but attainable objectives. Most important in this process is the idea of addressing challenges within your realm of control. In other words, the focus should be on the way that IT manages mobile, not on the ways in which the rest of the organization uses mobile. Measurable objectives Instead of saying that there is no corporate policy for mobile and that's a bad thing, we can restructure the objectives by saying that the cost of supporting mobile is difficult to scale. We can expand further with hard data showing that internal administrative and support costs for mobile are rising faster than the mobile expenditures themselves. And so the process of developing a set of corporate policies for mobile can be framed within the context of improving the efficiency of IT. This is simple realism, because IT and telecom managers know they can't be everywhere all the time. When someone buys a Motorola Q and downloads some music or video, will a telecom manager be there to stop him? The answer clearly is no, because IT will be focused on the big picture and won't be getting bent out of shape over every ring tone or game download. Sponsored By: Page 7 of 14

8 Five simple objectives Framed within the context of IT efficiency, here are five simple internal objectives for managers tasked with getting mobile "under control." 1. Minimizing the number and type of bills: There are simply too many ways for mobile bills to make their way into the system. In the ideal scenario, purchasing is centralized and individuals never actually see their bills. The second-best scenario involves corporate credit cards, where the credit card company can provide up-todate expense information every month. Finally, there are expense reports, which often reduce the expenditure to a line item -- IT has no idea how many minutes are used, how many are unused, or how to improve the efficiency of purchasing. By reducing the number and type of mobile bills, IT management can lower administrative costs and focus more resources on audit, accounting and service improvement. 2. Identifying "dead accounts": How many mobile accounts does your company have that are unused? How many times has a worker left the company, leaving a two-year service contract that goes unused for 18 months? Finding accounts with zero usage can be an effort that easily pays for itself. 3. Electronic billing: Getting bills in electronic format can reduce the labor overhead for scanning, OCR and data entry. Having the information available electronically can speed audit and accounting processes. 4. Audit and accounting: Finding such things as "dead accounts" is part of audit a series of processes that look for outliers, aberrations and unusual usage patterns. As with any mobile billing situation, investments in bill audit generally yield significant, measurable results both in terms of cost savings and policy enforcement. 5. Enforcing policies: There are several ways to think about policy enforcement. The first is to keep users from spending the company's money in the wrong way. The second is to make sure that workers are getting the right kinds of resources for the job. In an audit process, IT might find a worker who is exceeding his monthly mobile Sponsored By: Page 8 of 14

9 budget as defined in a policy. Further investigation finds that the worker is spending his money on overage. The remedy is to shift him to a more appropriate plan with more minutes, lowering expenses and enforcing both the policy and the budget. It's easy to think that mobility is something completely new, but just like the personal computer that came a generation earlier, mobile telephony is ultimately an IT expense. As managers set out to make sense of years of unmanaged policies, it's important to remember that the best way to "wrestle the alligator" is to focus on the attainable and to define very specific internal objectives for policy improvement. Sponsored By: Page 9 of 14

10 Success in managing wireless mobile expenses By Elisabeth Horwitt, Contributor About a year and a half ago, StarTek Inc.'s CIO Steve Boyer decided it was high time to take control of his company's wireless mobile expenses. A $200 million process outsourcing firm that specializes in call center management, StarTek is Denver-based but highly distributed: "So we have a strong dependency on mobile service to communicate with each other and with clients," Boyer said. With a wide variety of service contracts and the mobile arena in constant flux, Boyer's team found it extremely difficult to keep track of who was paying how much to which wireless service provider, for how many minutes per month. That inability was costing StarTek. "We weren't getting optimal deals" from wireless service providers, Boyer said. When, as part of an internal restructuring, the IT group inventoried every mobile phone number, it discovered a significant number of defunct mobile accounts for which the company was still paying. Concluding that StarTek lacked the resources to manage wireless expenses on its own, Boyer went looking for a wireless mobile expense management (WTEM) provider that could monitor StarTek's wireless service contracts to "make sure they are current and competitive, and negotiate the best market terms and conditions." He chose Telwares Communications LLC, which had already helped StarTek save 20% by renegotiating wireline contracts; and 25% to 30% on an annualized basis by setting up new rate structures. Boyer said he expects Pleasanton, Calif.-based Telwares to save StarTek between 25% and 30% annually, by negotiating more competitive rates with five or six wireless service providers. Not a lot of companies are following StarTek's strategy -- yet. Stamford, Conn. based- Gartner Inc. expects the global mobile expense management market to grow to about $500 million by year's end. About 15% of that market is WTEM, according to Phil Redman, a Sponsored By: Page 10 of 14

11 research vice president at the research firm. However, Gartner expects the WTEM market to start taking off in the time frame, as more companies "realize they're spending more and more, and they don't have the resources and expertise it takes" to manage and optimize wireless costs in-house, Redman said. The challenges Several factors make in-house WTEM a challenge, for any size firm. First, many companies leave the procurement of wireless services and devices to individual end users or sites. As a result, companies wind up contracting with a great many regional wireless providers, each on different terms. A March 2006 survey by Boston-based Aberdeen Group Inc. found 76% of respondents had at least some wireless devices that employees had bought, typically handing the costs over to the firm in a travel and entertainment report. "It's virtually impossible to quantify, qualify and understand all wireless costs when they're scattered among employee expense reports," the Aberdeen report notes. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited IT staffs are even more likely than enterprises to push purchase and deployment responsibilities onto end users, according to Gartner's Redman. Another key factor: Wireless expenses are in constant flux. Carriers keep updating their cost structures, introducing and terminating special deals, and adding restrictions. A typical wireless user base is equally volatile, with employees regularly changing jobs and locations both between and within companies, each time requiring wireless accounts to be terminated, added or changed. What this adds up to is a major management headache for IT administrators. The problem cannot be ignored, however. Security, budgetary and productivity concerns are pressuring companies to keep better track of employee wireless accounts and utilization -- not just how Sponsored By: Page 11 of 14

12 many minutes, but whether those minutes are being used for business or chatting with buddies. Making the case for SMBs Enterprises confront a much larger-scale WTEM challenge than small and midsized businesses (SMBs). However, as the StarTek case shows, SMBs face the same issues, as users' mobile devices proliferate. "WTEM is useful typically for those with 300 or 400 wireless devices and up," said Dawn Verbrigghe, director of business operations and development at iwave Inc. in New York. WTEM providers relieve SMBs of having to deal with wireless carriers -- a time-consuming and often frustrating task. Specific services include the following: Rating service providers in terms of their responsiveness to move/add/change requests, quality of service and price competitiveness. Regularly updating wireless contracts to reflect the latest changes in carrier rate structures and take advantage of time-limited special deals. Monitoring a company's service usage and alerting administrators when employees are exceeding minute allotments. Ensuring that bills accurately reflect actual usage, as well as current contract terms, and that rebates and cost savings a company has been promised, or qualifies for, are implemented correctly. This last service is key. Ten to 15 percent of all wired and wireless bills have inaccuracies, according to Gartner. However, few SMBs have the resources to continually check for mistakes, which are often small, buried in fine print, and tend to show up on a bill a month or two after they actually occurred. Which is why SMBs are turning to WTEM outsourcing. While many WTEM service providers primarily target enterprises, SMBs can find something to fit their budget and needs if they know where to look. Sponsored By: Page 12 of 14

13 Firms that cannot afford to hire a WTEM provider on an ongoing basis can choose to go with time-limited or one-shot arrangements. StarTek, for example, engages Telwares for a finite time "to get best possible terms and conditions" on contracts, Boyer said. "We internally administer monthly invoices, and monitor service." Telwares also gave StarTek one-time help defining a companywide cell phone usage policy that includes an approval process for establishing service and purchasing equipment that does not include unnecessary bells and whistles, and ensuring that wireless devices are used for "appropriate business purposes, and that we're getting appropriate equipment," Boyer said. Typical pricing for such services ranges from $2 to $10 per user per month, according to Redman. Some vendors charge on a contingency basis, according to how much they save a customer. A WTEM service provider can't do it all. SMBs need to do some initial spadework, including cleaning up their wireless device inventory and consolidating billing, if they want to get the most out of their WTEM provider, Verbrigghe said. But the gain is generally worth the pain, sources agree. Companies can expect to save between $24 and $120 per year, per user, by managing wireless mobile expenses, Redman said. IWave typically saves customers 30% to 40% the first year, on average, Verbrigghe claimed. StarTek's Boyer puts it like this: "The main thing is to ensure that we have good contracts in place with the flexibility to take advantage of future changes in the market, and in our own internal business needs." Sponsored By: Page 13 of 14

14 Resources from Xigo See Why Xigo is Different Xigo Now Free On Demand Mobile Expense Management Case Study: Four Best Practices to Maximize the Benefits of Telecom Expense Management About Xigo Xigo instantly reduces and controls mobile, fixed and global telecommunications costs for organizations of all sizes. The company provides the first and only on demand self service solution that uploads wireless bills and automatically generates immediate cost and timesaving results -- in minutes, not months. Xigo s single, cloud-based platform accommodates company growth without adding complexity and satisfies the full range of enterprise communications expense management requirements. Xigo s success is attributed to customer-centric innovations and industry firsts with more than a decade of expertise spanning wireless and wire line communications. Sponsored By: Page 14 of 14