Top tips for consolidating your communications costs


How to / Guide

April 24, 2020

As businesses around the world transition from responding to a crisis to facing a new reality and new way of working, many of them will find they need to re-evaluate the decisions they made at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. Enabling whole workforces to work remotely would present challenges under any circumstances, but the speed at which the situation unfolded caught many unprepared, and some organizations may have found themselves implementing costly interim measures, or making hasty decisions about projects that would normally take months to deliver.

Many businesses are therefore now starting to consider consolidating costs as they look to navigate a course through the economic challenges bought on by global lockdown measures. As a key component of their operations, one option they should explore is their voice communications system, which presents them with several opportunities to reduce costs.

Reduce mobile usage 

Did your business decide to forward your extensions to company mobiles following the lockdown? Although that is a valid short-term strategy for enabling remote workers, you will be paying more for your outbound calls in the longer run, so efforts should be made to migrate to more cost-effective methods, such as Microsoft Teams or hosted/WebRTC solutions. Or are your remote workers simply reverting to expensive calls from company mobiles to maintain communications, because it is easy and accessible? This could indicate they have inadequate tooling or user training. Monitor the usage of company mobiles and review the trends, taking steps to train users and making your preferred communications systems as accessible as possible.

Consolidate services to a single provider

Using different suppliers may have formed part of a deliberate strategy to minimize risk, or something that has organically developed over time. In either case, there could be economies of scale and cost savings your business is missing out on by opting for smaller packages of services with multiple suppliers. Investigate whether there are any cost savings to be had by migrating voice services to a single supplier.

Only pay for what you use

Many bundled call plans leave you with unused minutes, or charge a premium if your users exceed your plan limits.  In addition, some plans charge for complete minutes, rather than the seconds you actually use. If the average call is between one and two minutes, but you are charged for two minutes every time, that soon adds up. Monitor your usage, review your plans and move services if necessary.

Seek transparency

Unfortunately, some “per user, per month” pricing models are designed to keep the details of what exactly is included, and the pricing of individual services unclear. In some cases, your business may be paying for services that you don't need, so always seek transparency over what your contract actually covers and where necessary, remove any surplus services.

At Pure IP, we pride ourselves on being transparent and honest about our services. We only propose and charge for what our customers actually need.  If you need advice on consolidating your costs, or would like to find out more about us, please get in touch.

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