The global telecom market size is expected to reach $2.46 trillion this year, continuing at a strong 6 percent growth rate until at least 2035.
Fortunately, with the right planning and preparations, your telecom expenses don’t have to grow at that rate—and they could actually go down!
Wondering how your business can make that a reality and not just a stretch goal?
That’s where the expertise that telecom expense management (TEM) professionals can bring comes in.
Here’s what you need to know about TEM and what it can mean for your business’s bottom line:
Today’s Enterprise Telecom Environment Challenges
Managing your telecom environment can be time-consuming, especially in a large, complex enterprise.
It can be especially difficult to find the balance between minimizing costs and maintaining a high level of service.
At the same time, many enterprise departments are beginning to face the consequences of some of the decisions that they made during and in the wake of the pandemic. During this time, telecom management could be better defined as “crisis management” as teams worked to alleviate disruptions. The policies enacted then now need to be re-evaluated.
How Telecom Expense Management Services Can Help
Telecom expense management is a service that uses industry experts and purpose-built tools to help your departments find new ways to optimize every aspect of your telecom lifecycle. This includes ordering and provisioning equipment, ongoing support, cost management, and everything in between—all on a global scale.
TEM works by improving visibility across your communications, associated IT services, and telecom inventories, continuously auditing your telecom environment and identifying cost-saving and optimization opportunities. With a centralized and holistic view across your telecom expenses—including billing records, contracts, tariffs, and inventories—TEM experts can recommend guidance or manually optimize your environment for you.
Importantly, a telecom expense management provider doesn’t have to replace your internal teams; it can provide its unique expertise or deliver a fully managed service to enable the work already being done by in-house professionals.
Whatever the deployment model, outsourcing your TEM can give you unique benefits across a wide range of processes:
- Continuous auditing
- Benchmarking, sourcing, and procurement
- Invoice management
- Inventory management
- Mobility
- Support
Your internal teams might already be working hard to manage these functions. But your enterprise could further reduce costs and achieve greater long-term value from your telecom environment with the help of a telecom expense management provider.
3 Reasons for Outsourcing Telecom Expense Management
In addition to helping with the efficient management of specific elements of your telecom environment, choosing to outsource your TEM can deliver broad benefits to your operations:
1. Improve the Visibility of Your Telecom Environment
Internal teams have multiple roles to juggle. Many don’t have the time or resources to re-evaluate the telecom environment continuously, let alone conduct invoice audits. Over time, this can lead to inconsistencies and inefficiencies going unnoticed.
For example, outdated and inefficient telecoms contracts, overspending, and wasted resources can add up—especially for a global organization.
However, a TEM provider can perform telecom audits line by line, providing in-depth reviews of contracts, billing records, inventories, and tariffs by location to identify cost-saving opportunities.
2. Understand Your Telecoms Billing
Telecom costs get complicated. Even the most knowledgeable finance departments can have trouble keeping up with the nuances of telecom expenses.
This can be especially pronounced for global businesses wondering if they are getting the most value from their telecom contracts when their work spans different countries, currencies, and languages.
Making these reviews even more complex is the fact that invoices will vary dramatically between geographical location or telecom carrier, meaning costs can rise without being noticed.
TEM experts have years of experience and proven tools to better manage your telecom billings by standardizing the data, improving visibility, and reviewing contracts with carriers. Leading TEM providers have the in-region knowledge and experience to expedite the process to fix billing errors and eliminate hidden costs, no matter where they are in the world.
3. Get Greater Flexibility and Support
Finally, an optimized telecom environment means your business is better equipped to improve and innovate your technology.
The last few years have created a dramatic shift in how businesses use their communications. Hybrid working has become the norm, with 81 percent of organizations following a model where workers are working remotely part- or full-time. To enable this model effectively, organizations need to have the processes in place to effectively manage the security, compliance, and support functions of a growing telecom environment.
A TEM provider can support you in getting end-users the devices, connectivity, and support they need to work efficiently. They can manage the logistics and costs of the entire mobility lifecycle, from deployment to eventual end-of-life, ensuring that every step benefits from the best rates.
Cutting-edge telecom expense management providers can even support your internal teams with managing security and compliance through a single, convenient portal.
Outsourcing Telecom Expense Management Helps You Improve Efficiency, Fast
Your business grows and evolves every day—and so do your employees’ telecom requirements and the technology that enables them.
That’s why your business can no longer afford to have a one-and-done approach to its telecom expense management, hoping that the old model will keep up with tomorrow’s needs.
Choosing to partner with a TEM can be a real differentiator, providing continuous support and cost-control and freeing up internal resources to focus on other strategic initiatives.
Don’t let your hidden telecom costs continue to add up. Learn more about how telecom expense management can help you immediately identify cost savings and unlock long-term value.
