Companies overpay for their telecoms services because they don't fully understand their monthly recurring costs (MRCs).
Hidden charges within your MRCs can have a serious impact on enterprises with a telecoms environment that spans thousands of devices. With more people working from home than ever before during this period of uncertainty, keeping employees connected is incredibly important. Understanding your MRCs grants you greater visibility over your entire ecosystem, and identifying the areas of expenditure will give you more opportunities to save money and optimize your operations.
An experienced telecom expense management (TEM) vendor can identify and expose areas of unnecessary spend within your recurring costs, and ensure your organization isn't overspending in any areas you might have missed.
What Do Your MRCs Include?
MRCs are telecom fees your company must pay each month to continue using a service. Missing a payment would be hugely detrimental, but habitually overpaying each month is just as damaging.
Organizations must pay MRCs for each of their connected devices. Understanding all of the charges that come with each end-user can be difficult, especially once those devices are away from the workplace. MRCs include:
- Line rental - the cost of maintaining the wire that delivers your communications services. This MRC ensures that any faults with the wire can usually be fixed without a one-off fee.
- Service charges
- Usage charges - the cost accrued by how much data is being consumed by your business. It's important to have information on this down to every individual end-user to stay on top of your costs.
- Managed services (if provided by the vendor)
Line rental and service charges should be the same each month, but usage charges will vary depending on the amount of data required to be consumed. It’s important to be aware of hidden costs that might be grouped under a single charge. These include costs for:
- Long-distance services
- Teleconferencing
- Inbound or outbound calls
- Toll-free service
- International calls
Paying these MRCs is essential to the upkeep of your telecoms services, so understanding where each cost is coming from is key.
The Importance of Understanding Your MRCs
Ensuring you aren’t overpaying each month for any of your connected devices means knowing what the best contracts, plans, and tariffs are for your organization.
For example, if your enterprise has a monthly recurring telecom charge of $10,000 in one location every month, but a calculation of service error means you should only be paying $9,000 a month, you’re overpaying enormously. You shouldn’t have to calculate whether your business can afford an extra $12,000 a year per location – proper management of your MRCs and your telecom expenses in general can detect these anomalies.
For telecom expenses that average $150,000 or more a month over 30+ locations, savings from errors could total huge amounts of money back into your enterprise. Costs across such a huge environment are difficult to keep track of, especially when dealing with the other aspects of your business.
If your bill covers thousands of connected devices, it’s even harder to get an idea of the full extent of any overpayments. Without sufficient information from the telecoms carrier, it’s impossible to have true visibility and therefore control over your end-user management.
Employing the skills of an experienced TEM vendor assists you in dealing with telecom carriers and securing the best deals for your organization’s requirements.
How a TEM Vendor Helps You Know Your MRCs
Working with a TEM vendor relieves your business of the stress of working out telecoms deals. Instead, the TEM vendor negotiates on your behalf with a clear understanding of the policies and plans that best fit your organization.
TEM optimizes your company’s telecoms. An experienced vendor will work alongside your business as a partner, reviewing your invoices and dealing with carriers. Management of your MRCs will generate continuous savings, providing real value for your business.
Data is vital when it comes to managing your expenses and a TEM vendor optimizes your business inventory. This grants you valuable data for a device in any given location. By improving your asset visibility, you can see where the highest amount of spend is within your company. Telecom expense audits identify and resolve any errors with your bills, and these are carried out by your TEM partner.
Working with a TEM vendor to manage your telecom costs removes the frustration and stress of dealing with confusing, vague telecoms contracts and jargon. An experienced TEM vendor can source the best rates and negotiate that space for you, keeping an eye on your costs while your business worries about what matters most.
Topics: TEM
