Cell phone billing overcharges are major cost management headaches for corporate users but you can save a fortune with a few common sense tips on how to better manage your corporate wireless telecom expense. What general areas do we review during a professional cell phone bill audit and what kinds of problems are most troublesome and cause the biggest cost overages for audit clients?
1. Check internet usage and text messaging charges for each cell phone user. Make sure that your employees are authorized to have internet access and if they do, most should have unlimited texting if the exceed a certain amount–check with your wireless carrier. Each data user needs to use those services responsibly and have the most appropriate pricing package for those services and know what the limitations are. Texting is a valuable business tool and we’ve seen hundreds of dollars in cell phone texting charges that could have been prevented by putting text happy employees on a $5 per month plan for unlimited texting. If you don’t want your employees texting, eliminate that capability on their cell phones.
2. Each month, look for cell phone usage minute overage charges, roaming charges, and billed featuresof each user on the cell phone bill. Online cell phone billing platforms from the carriers enable you to run reports on these items to help you filter vast amounts of data to get to the golden savings. Use the online billing tools and reports, they’re often free and easy to navigate.
3. Check pooling of minutes: Change calling habits of your cell phone users. If we see lot of calls to a person on a land line telephone from one of our cell phone users that has free mobile to mobile minutes (MTM), we would look to change their calling habits or perhaps make sure the person at the other end of the land line has a cell phone on our plan with free mobile to mobile minutes. When a call is made to a land line telephone from a cell phone, it is charged against pooled minutes, often causing overages which cost you a lot of money. Mobile to mobile calls often do not eat up your peak minutes, so make sure your take advantage of free minutes, not using up your precious costed, pooled or peak minutes that count against your normal usage minutes.
Tip: You heard it here first: You can also ask your cell phone carrier to exclude certain frequently dialed numbers that you call from your cell phone. This will cut your peak minute allocations and very often the cell phone company will accommodate this. In fact, Verizon wireless has a recent promotion giving business users 10 of their top ten dialed numbers with unlimited cell phone minutes.
4. Check directory assistance charges. If someone is making a lot of directory assistance (411 information calls) on their cell phone, we’ll suggest that they instead use a discount directory assistance vendor or restrict their calling to specially dialed free 411 services from their cellphones. Users can also use their office pcs or blackberries to look up directory service information (if they have an unlimited data plan), it is a lot cheaper than paying 411 service. So beware, cell phones can incur directory assistance charges as high as $2.50 per directory assistance inquiry! For large companies, this can be a huge expense each month and very often, employees actually think its free to their company, but carrier directly assistance service is not free.
5. New wireless equipment not discounted: We often find that cell phones and blackberries do not always get the correct discount as per corporate cell phone contract, check those discounts and get your refunds.
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6. Cancel unused cell phones. Unused and underutilized phones should be reviewed for removal. As soon as an employee is terminated their cell phone should either be assigned to a new user or given to someone to monitor it or taken out of service, depending on the situation. If you have a sales team, if possible, make sure that you issue the cell phone and the number from your company, think twice about reimbursing them for their personal cell phone usage that they use on business, otherwise, the sales person takes that cell phone and number (a valuable asset) to their next job if they leave, perhaps your competitor gets the future sale by your client simply calling your former sales rep on their cell phone with their next order through your competitor. This is a very real issue that we come across and it is something to consider.
7. Take advantage of the latest cell phone pricing plans. Cell phone and blackberry device prices are constantly going down in the wireless phone industry, not up. We take advantage of the downtrend in pricing by checking on new cell phone plan promotions every month or two.
8. Institute and have your employees adhere to a strict company cell phone policy. Make employees aware of the kinds of cell phone plan you are on and educate them how they should most efficiently utilize the wireless plan and equipment that you provide. Demonstrate expectations of cell phone usage and have them sign a cell phone policy agreement.
9. Use the correct and most cost effective calling service: Employee callers who call your company with their cell phones should consider using a landline phone to dial the toll-free number to save on cell minutes or use the cell phone mobile to mobile to save on toll-free costs as applicable. If you are incurring billing to your company, bill on one telecom service by using the landline or the cell phone connection, not two services that will be billed to you.
10. Cramming: Look out for cell phone cramming or premium service charges. Cramming has been around for years on landline telephone bills, however, this phenomenon and nuisance is becoming a huge problem for corporate mobile phone users. These are 3rd party charges placed on your cell phone accounts by overzealous 3rd party billers. The cell phone audit will pick these charges up immediately. They include but are not limited to, GPS services, holographs, screen savers, games, music, ringtones and a myriad of other services you and your users never ordered or remember ordering. Like local and long distance phone bill cramming, They’re often buried in the bill and difficult to detect and decipher.
11. Default costed features on new phones: When you order and receive a new cell phone, you are often automatically granted internet access by the carrier by default. This is particularly true with AT&T wireless. Your new cell phone user plays around with his phone (new toy) and connects to the internet…a lot. They may be thinking, “wow my old cell phone would not let me connect to the internet but the new one does and I can google as much as I want!” Stop right there! No you cannot connect to the internet as much as you want without paying a huge cost!
Be ready for sticker shock, next month’s cell phone bill will show a huge per kilobyte charges for internet access and this can go on for months with huge charges unless you discover and stop it. You should call the carrier and they’ll explain that the new phones come with internet access as a default. This is not right and you don’t have to take this because you did not specifically order internet access! Time to demand a refund. With the reliable carriers, they know the problem and they should refund you immediately with no questions asked.
Our current national business cell phone carrier rankings (2009) are as follows based on our experience for best competitive pricing and service is currently ranked as follows:
Number 1: Sprint
Best Pricing
Number 2: Verizon Wireless
Best Service
Number 3: AT&T Wireless
Good Pricing and Service
Number 4: Nextel Wireless
Good pricing and service
Number 5: T-Mobile
Good pricing with below average sales support
Cell Phone Industry Termination Fees
Alltel: $200 per phone line
- CellularOne: $200 per phone line
- Centennial: $250 per phone line
- AT&T: $175 per phone line
- Nextel: $200 per phone line
- Sprint: $200 per phone line
- T-Mobile: $200 per phone line
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