Optimizing Telecommunications Expenses Through Deep Dive Analytics

How do organizations maximize functionality while minimizing cost?

STEP 1 Start with a Deep Dive Analysis of all your telecom costs.
Review every invoice and carefully document exactly how much you are spending at each location. Quantify and categorize costs by service provider, service type, bandwidth, etc. Understanding your current inventory of services and the associated spend is foundational.

STEP 2 Determine your overall Strategic Priorities.
What is most important to your organization at this time? Increasing bandwidth to allow for a more sophisticated customer experience? Improving redundancy to harden your network and decrease downtime? Reducing costs? Reducing the number of providers to simplify invoices and accounts payable?

STEP 3 Based on Step 2, build a Technology Roadmap.
Determine the end state telecommunications design for your voice and data networks, contact centers, data centers, offices, and remote locations.

• Are you shifting to an SDWAN network?
• What kind of primary and secondary circuits do you need at each location?
• Will you convert all your offices to a Unified Communications platform (UCaaS)?
• Is it time to switch your contact center to a cloud model?
• Are you migrating some data, software and services from on prem to the cloud?

STEP 4 Gather Quotes from multiple providers for the various technology options identified in Step 3.
Make sure providers don’t exclude additional or hidden costs in their quotes.

STEP 5 Consider your options… Compare and Analyze the pricing and benefits from the various quotes. How do they stack up against each other? How do they compare to your current costs? Ensuring the cost comparisons are like-for-like can be difficult and typically requires an experienced team with intimate knowledge of solutions and how they are bid. And keep in mind, many new technology choices offer improved features and functionality while actually reducing your costs.

STEP 6 Choose which technologies and service providers best meet your goals.

STEP 7 Execute.
Negotiate favorable contracts, put a solid project plan together, get an experienced PM, and start working through your technology migrations. Make sure your billing is set up correctly for new services, and check to be sure disconnected services come off your bill.

One piece of advice: Get help. All of these steps require a significant spike in effort and time.

Rather than overload your staff, consider engaging a qualified partner who can apply their experience, relationships, processes, tools, and staff to help you optimize your long-term goals. The right partner will take on much of the work involved.