AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile Business Cell Phone Service is not easy to manage. Here are a few tips on wireless expense management from an expert. This is a guest post by Moe Arnaiz one of the foremost authorities on business cell phone services of AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile.
1) Every carrier
claims to be the best in their space; AT&T pumps up their worldwide
footprint boasting coverage in a fictitious combination of areas such as “works
in philowarepraugacago,” Verizon has you covered with their “It’s the Network”
campaign and Sprint can get you there faster with “Sprint Speed”. The bottom
line is that the Big 3 (Sprint, Verizon, AT&T) all have comparable
solutions. The biggest difference in the Big 3 is simply the way
they’re marketed to the YOU, the end user.
So throw out your brand loyalty and make
a decision based on what fits the needs of your enterprise – after all, next month the carrier you
hate may acquire the carrier you love.
(Example:)
- You want high-speed internet, you may
think “Sprint Speed”, but Verizon has similar speeds on the same Rev-A
technology as Sprint.
- How about getting your email on your
Blackberry while on a business trip in Hong Kong,
probably think you need AT&T, but the fact is Verizon and Sprint can
deliver on that promise as well.
2) The infamous
cellular plan; all of us have been burned by them, many of us know someone
that has a better one, and they always cost more than we expect. The fact of the matter is by the time you
select your perfect plan a new and better one is available. As cellular evolves the costs for
the service declines, but wait a minute -- that doesn’t mean that your costs
for the service decline.
In a perfect world your carrier would always make sure that
you were on the best offering available, but in a cellular world your offer is
only as good as what you signed up for. If you are committed to managing your
company’s cellular account the "right way" it's necessary to review your account
on a monthly basis and reference your plan with the existing carrier offerings
to ensure you are getting the best bang for your buck. Recently carriers have
been encouraged by various lawsuits to refrain from renewing contract terms and
charging early termination penalties when making plan changes. Now you have no
excuse! You should always have everybody
on the best plan.
3) End user plan
compatibility; the only thing that can hurt your company’s pocket book more
than a bad plan is a plan that doesn’t meet the needs of an end user. It's important that every plan is selected
for the person that's using it. For example an unlimited text messaging
plan is a complete waste of money for a person not using the feature, but for the
person using text messaging it can save hundreds of dollars in unnecessary
per message charges. The more users you have, the more complicated it can
become to juggle this recurring task, but neglecting it wont make it go away; instead
it will surely produce an astronomical invoice.
4) Feature Blocking;
all the carriers have the ability to block unwanted features such as text
messaging, web, voice calls, etc., but few advertise it to their customer base
as it reduces revenue and hurts the carriers bottom line. It is always recommended to block the cellular
features you don’t want an employee to access, don’t leave it up to
them to make the call, rather go the most cost efficient and management
friendly route and make it for them.
5) The equipment
subsidy; many carriers lure business customers into 2-3yr contracts with
enticing equipment subsidies. Is this a
bad thing? Not always, the bottom line
is signing a contract allows the carriers to lock in future revenue and give
upfront plan and equipment subsidies that can reduce the cost to implement a
solution for your company. The best
advice to follow while negotiating this aspect of a cellular deal is to only extend
the term when you receive more subsidies.
6) Billing;
“nobody is perfect”… The carriers take this phrase straight to the bank. Cellular billing errors can occur on a monthly
basis. They can stem from many different
places. For example you called that rep at AT&T and told them to add data
to your bosses new Blackberry, but little did you know it wasn’t added
correctly. Your next bill arrives and he's been charged $600 in data charges
(i.e. many unhappy iPHONE customers). Or
maybe the rep didn’t set it to take effect until the beginning of your next
billing cycle, but your boss started using it right away and the charges
started piling up. Billing errors like
this are common at cellular companies as are their empty promises of making
sure that they won’t happen again.
7) Carrier reps;
have you ever been promised the world by a carrier rep and then received a
solution that didn’t quite work out as promised? Remember, they represent the carrier.
They may promise to have the best of the best and may get it to you at an
amazingly low price and though they may even deliver on that promise the stats of
unhappy customers show that in many cases the promises aren’t being kept.
Look to source from multiple channels (agents, business mvno's, direct sales) or seek a company that specializes in cellular from a
carrier agnostic perspective. Ask lots of questions such as…why this carrier,
why this solution, how are you compensated, why should I work with you over the
next guy, how is my post rollout support, if you leave who helps me, etc. Remember
the easy part is making the decision on what to buy – the hard part is getting support
after the rep that closed your deal has been paid a big commission! Make sure you make a relationship with
somebody that benefits from you paying your bill every month and isn’t just
motivated by the first order.
8) Customer care;
lol!!! This is almost an oxymoron in
cellular unless you are an enterprise like GM or FORD. Odds are you’ve had your account team change
every 3-6 months, that is if you’re lucky enough to have an account team, and if
they aren’t available or you don’t have one and need to resolve an issue you
call an 800 number, you then pray that the person is competent…oh wait they’re
not... call again. After a few
hours on the phone and countless transfers your issue is finally resolved only
to get your next bill and find out that the charge that rep said was reversed –
wasn’t. TRY AGAIN… and so the game
goes.
While it is easy to place the blame on the carrier here, how
many resources can the carrier really assign to an account? The answer is not
many. So while they may tell you that
poor customer service “is a known issue and it is being worked on”, don’t hold
your breath – until you are billing enough to justify a 5 person account team
you will continue to be transferred to the same person that is trained to help
little Timmy trouble shoot the 50 Cent song he downloaded on his RAZR 2.
How do you avoid this headache? Luckily there are companies out there that bridge
the gap of the customer’s needs and the carrier inability to meet them through
cellular managed services programs. In the long run it makes sense to pay a marginal
fee and ensure that your problems are fixed by an expert. With a wireless expense management company you will see an instant ROI on time, money and your
cellular solutions performance.
9) The carrier
transition; this process has become easier over the past couple of years
with WLNP (Wireless Local Number Portability) allowing users to keep their
existing phone number when swapping carriers. But, depending on the size of
your account transitioning cellular companies can be a logistical nightmare. Make
sure that you are working with someone that has a proven track record of
executing this process seamlessly. Ask
for referrals of past customers comparable to your size that have transitioned
through them and call them for feedback.
Make sure that you find out about all known transitioning
issues before you start the process. That will enable you to prepare and plan for
them prior to the implementation. Most importantly have adequate time to
control potential challenges. The best time to make a transition is on a Sunday
morning, generally the least important time for a business to need cellular
connectivity. If an issue occurs it gives you 24 hours to work on resolution
before the work week starts and the heat gets turned up a few notches.
The last thing you want is for your CEO to be without email
while he is off at that big meeting trying to close the deal of the year for
your company.
10) Procurement; naturally
your implementation of mobile solutions has made your business more productive. Now you need to order new devices and grow your
account. Make sure that you order from a
consistent source, spreading orders across multiple vehicles such as stores,
online and B-to-B reps can result in a cellular account that is in disarray. Make
sure that you are ordering from people that actually look at what you need and
make recommendations accordingly rather than based off of commission payouts. The
best way to ensure that this is happening is to do a monthly bill audit, look for
how many minutes you are paying for vs. how many you actually used. Look for features
end users aren’t using. Look for new plans that can lower your overall costs. This
can be a painstaking process, but it is an essential piece to any well managed
cellular account.
Now with this quick crash course in business cell phone service you
now have some common knowledge about the industry, how it works and what to
expect. So you can take a deep breath,
rub your eyes and figure out how you are going to cleverly put this responsibility
on someone else’s plate. Good luck!