When was the last time you looked at your telecoms bill and asked, “Why are we paying this?”
Not because the invoice was incorrect or the amount had suddenly increased but because you wanted to understand whether the business still needed everything it was paying for.
For many organisations, telecoms spend doesn’t receive that level of scrutiny just as long as the services are working and the monthly spend doesn’t look dramatically different from the previous month. But over time, that can create a dangerous assumption: if we have always paid for it, we must still need it. But telecom environments don’t stand still and nor do organisations.
Spend becomes normal surprisingly quickly
A business might spend a significant amount on telecoms every month but if that figure has remained relatively consistent, nobody questions it because it has become part of the normal cost of doing business. The problem is that consistency doesn’t necessarily mean correctness. A cost can remain consistent while the requirement behind it has changed completely. A service that was essential when it was introduced may now be underused, a mobile service could still be active even though the employee it was originally assigned to is no longer with the company and so on. None of these costs necessarily creates an obvious problem and that’s exactly why they can be difficult to identify.
Who is actually challenging the spend?
Finance is responsible for processing and allocating telecoms costs, IT is responsible for ensuring services work, procurement manages supplier relationships and contracts and business units are responsible for requesting and using services. But who is looking across the entire environment and asking whether the spend still makes sense? That question matters because each department sees a different part of the picture but none of those views necessarily provides the complete picture of whether the organisation is getting the right value from its telecoms environment.
This is why Telesa is so important. Our independent perspective looks across suppliers, services, contracts, costs and so on without being responsible for selling or maintaining a particular service.
Challenging spend doesn’t mean cutting everything
There is a misconception that questioning telecoms spend automatically means looking for ways to reduce it but that isn’t necessarily the case.
For example, a business may discover that some of its most expensive services are completely justified because they support critical operations so cutting those services simply because they are expensive could create far greater problems elsewhere.
The more important question is whether the cost is appropriate for the business requirement. A R100,000 service that is essential to a critical operation may provide considerably more value than a R10,000 service that nobody uses. This is why telecoms optimisation should not be reduced to a simple cost-cutting exercise.
The objective should be to understand what the business has, what it needs, what it is paying for and whether those things are aligned.
The cost of not asking questions
The biggest telecoms costs aren’t always the obvious ones. It’s easy to notice when a supplier increases a bill significantly but its much harder to notice the smaller costs that continue month after month without attracting any attention.
One unused service might not seem important, nor might one outdated contract or a handful of unnecessary connections but those costs start to accumulate quite quickly.
However, the issue isn’t always the amount being spent, it’s the fact that nobody can confidently explain why it is being spent. That lack of visibility can make it difficult to budget accurately, negotiate effectively or make informed decisions when the business’s requirements change. A telecoms environment that isn’t regularly challenged can gradually become an accumulation of historical decisions.
Your suppliers aren’t necessarily going to ask the question for you
There is also an important distinction between a relationship with your supplier and your relationship with Telesa.
A service provider’s role is to provide and support the services the business purchases, where an independent telecoms management team has a different responsibility: to look at the environment from the customer’s perspective and determine whether the services, costs and contractual arrangements continue to make sense for the organisation.
Those objectives don’t have to be in conflict. A good supplier relationship can be extremely valuable but businesses should understand that they can’t outsource responsibility for understanding their own telecoms environment.
If the only person reviewing your telecoms spend is the organisation sending the invoice, there is a natural limit to how much that review can challenge the underlying requirement. This is one of the reasons as to why independent oversight is so valuable.
You can’t challenge what you can’t see
There is one fundamental requirement before any of these questions can be answered: visibility.
If telecoms information is spread across multiple supplier portals, invoices, contracts, spreadsheets and internal systems, it becomes difficult to challenge spend with confidence.
You need to know what you have before you can determine whether you need it.
This is where technology can make a significant difference. Our centralised telecoms management platform, Telegence, brings information together from across the telecoms environment, helping businesses gain a more consolidated view of costs, contracts, services, suppliers and other important areas of telecoms management.
Telegence gives organisations the visibility needed to make better-informed decisions.
So, when was the last time someone challenged your telecom spend?
And if nobody can remember, perhaps that’s the first question worth asking.
