Here’s what the world is expected to spend on telecom by the end of 2023: US$1,885.41 billion. And this number is expected to reach US$2,874.76 billion by 2030. A little less than half of this spending comes from business customers, like your company.
So what are businesses doing to ensure that this expenditure is well-managed?
Well, to ensure they have well-managed telecom expenditure, they increasingly turn to TEM software. This market is witnessing remarkable growth at 10.8% and is expected to be valued at US$ 5.3 billion by 2028. Clearly, businesses are wising up to the fact that telecom expense management deserves their attention.
You can also be a part of this exponential growth by incorporating proven strategies of telecom expense management into your business. This can help you reduce operational costs and increase efficiency.
Implementing Effective Telecom Expense Management Strategies
Managing telecom expenses strategically is now a key component of an IT team’s functions. It can help you in maximizing efficiency and meet the requirements of applicable compliance frameworks. A comprehensive telecom expense management can help you reduce as much as 25-40% of the expenses – translating to millions of dollars!
If you also want to optimize cost savings, here are proven strategies for implementing TEM in your organization:
- Conducting comprehensive telecom audit
As per ETMA’s Telecom Expense Management Justification report, auditing can save up to 15% of your telecom expenses.
When you conduct a comprehensive audit, it forces you to take a long and hard look at your existing system and detect errors. It can be related to system allocation, billing errors, and whether the money you have invested in providing a return on investment.
- Optimizing telecom contracts and service agreements
Does your team have the bandwidth to pore over contracts and service agreements, conduct consistent checks on how competitive these are, and renegotiate rates where applicable? Are you investigating telecom invoicing overages?
Companies report anywhere between 5% and 25% cost savings from having telecom bills audited. With all these factors in mind, it is crucial for businesses to have defined processes around contract and invoice vetting and renegotiations.
You can incorporate an automated process for repeated tasks to manage your contracts and agreements. Take proactive steps to manage invoices and contracts or consult a TEM provider.
- Implementing cost control measures
Overspending is not just a factor of being overbilled. You could also be wasting dollars on the underutilization of rate plans. You can prevent this with three important maneuvers.
- Usage monitoring
You want to ensure that you’re footing telecom, data and wireless bills linked to business use cases only.
- Rate plan optimization
The idea here is to check if you are overestimating requirements and if there is room for opting for lower-value plans from telecom and wireless service providers.
- Forecasting
Depending on your sector, it is possible that telecom service utilization goes through dips and spikes. By forecasting your team’s needs, you can control spending by modifying service plans to match forecasted requirements.
- Leveraging data analytics for decision-making
What isn’t being measured, cannot be managed. Or fixed. You need to gather – and then analyze – data around
I) Inefficiencies or low functionality of devices and network service providers
II) Trends and cycles around the point we just discussed, that is utilization
III) Contracts that are live, and you’re still getting invoices for, even though you have canceled and utilization is zero
Armed with this data, you are better placed to find better, more cost-effective solutions. According to Harvard Business Review, consolidating incidentals might be a good way to start and get to about 10% cost reduction.
- Ensuring compliance and security
TEM and compliance go hand in hand. It has been reported that with smaller data breaches, companies face 5-9% decline in their reputational intangible capital.
Your device audit is not just a TEM requirement but also essential from a compliance perspective. Vendors that handle voice, data, and wireless need to comply with security standards that work for the kind of data they process.
If they aren’t compliant, vendors can weaken your security posture and, in the event of any breaches, security incidents, or audit findings, cost you hefty penalties or loss of business. Why loss of business? Because your customers are likely to suffer a loss of trust in your organization if they find out that their data is at risk because you’re not being sufficiently thorough.
- Streamlining invoice processing and payment management
Adopting a 360-degree approach to TEM can help you to achieve better results from your efforts. By implementing TEM software, you can streamline invoicing process and payment management for greater company benefits.
With TEM software, you get access to pre-negotiated rates and the ability to automatically opt-in and out of plans. You can easily optimize your telecom services while reducing costs!
Imagine how much easier it would be to spot anomalies if you could get overviews and granular insights from the same report – and check high usage or low usage in the same place.
Well, TEM software provides you with the same. It offers a ready-made dashboard where you can spot problematic patterns, monitor high and low usage, and identify cost-saving opportunities. You can automate your incident recordings and receive one consolidated invoice.
With TEM software, you get all of the above. This translates to less admin burden on your IT team (so that they can focus on more important tasks), cost optimization, and better efficiency. Use this convenient calculator to identify how much your business can save with active, automated TEM.
Case Study
The State of Oregon managed to roll out what was initially a challenging new implementation with a new telecom provider, once they had a TEM partner to help. Additionally, their TEM software made it easy for nearly 1000 authorizers and billing coordinators, and checkers from its state agencies to improve telecom invoicing SOPs. The State of Oregon also experienced more efficiency in business processes and was able to reduce costs thanks to business analytics presented in easy-to-use dashboards.
Want to Handle TEM Holistically and Really Reduce Costs?
Spenza gives you software-as-a-service to help get TEM processes up and running right now. With Spenza, you get a Telecom Expense Management software that actually works – quickly and effectively – to help businesses of all sizes get more out of our telecom budgets. Get business-level to user-level insights with business intelligence dashboards. Enjoy the best rates, thanks to pre-negotiated plans. And ease invoicing with all-in-one, consolidated bills.
Get in touch to make TEM easier and more efficient.
