To follow up on our last post – “What is Telecom Expense Management“, we’ll discuss more in detail WHOneeds it.  (hint: the answer is probably you)

You may be thinking, why does my firm need telecom expense management?

That’s a good question. The easiest answer, and the one most company management teams want to hear, is because “It saves you money”. Period.

But how….?

To conduct business today, we know you need tools and you need technology. This means telephones, mobile phones, pagers, expensive high-speed internet connections, laptops with wireless capabilties, the list goes on and on. And, over time, the list not only gets longer as new gadgets hit the market, but the number of people within your organization who needs these things goes up. All of that leads to complexity, and complexity can lead to errors.

Forrester Research estimates that “billing errors average 5% to 12% of ongoing telecom services budgets”. We would concur with that. In our 20+ years of doing telecom audits, we’ve found that over 35% of invoices have some type of error. If you’re not watching for them, you don’t see them. In just one client example, a health care facility had torn down a building. But when they contracted with us to review their telecom invoices, we determined that they had been getting billed, and had been paying for, fifty landline telephones in a ghost building that was now a parking lot! For twelve years!

Now that is a huge error, and you think you’d find it yourself – but guess what? With complexity also comes workload. Your telecom landscape may include tens, hundreds or thousands of monthly invoices, circuits or devices . And the latest trend, to hand telecom management to an already overworked IT staff that often isn’t familiar with telecom services and thus doesn’t know what to look for, isn’t helping.

There are also outside market pressures at work. Things are constantly getting more complex and more expensive. According to Aberdeen Research, firms are also dealing with “financial regulations like Sarbanes Oxley compliance, implementation of new technology, globalization, carrier consolidation and increasing security concerns, like wireless e-mail/PDAs with sensitive data that is not centrally managed.”

It all points to a rising need for automated TEM processes, whether in-house or outsourced. According to Gartner, “at the heart of any TEM offering is an automated software platform used by the business or by an external service provider managing a company’s telecom invoices and assets.” And it’s a surefire bet to save you money. As stated by the AOTMP report The Value of TEM to SMB (small-to-mid-sized-business), “SMBs with a TEM program save 22% more than companies who do not.” Now is the time. That is what Valicom does, save money on telecom, so let us help you do it.