Review telecom invoices for Errors
Most organizations know that they need to regularly review their telecom bills for errors. Two of the ways they do this is to engage a third-party generalist or use a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) provider.
These reviews can be a good start but our experience suggests that you will still be leaving money on the table – often tens of thousands of dollars per month.
To understand why these solutions are not doing the best job for you, we need to examine both.
Third-party generalist “auditors” – Carrier Agents
A generalist offers telecom bill audits as one of many services including:
- procurement services
- consulting
- network design
- contract negotiation
- optimization.
They offer an “audit” as a loss-leader which gives them the opportunity to identify other more lucrative opportunities to sell their services. The “audit” is often just a brief review of services with recommendations to change carriers. Your organization may be able to cut costs in this way. But ultimately this is NOT in your organization’s best interests. Once you do switch carriers, you lose any opportunity you had to recover overcharges that you paid in error. And, you may no longer have leverage in negotiations with the carrier.
Bottom line – these agents represent the carrier’s best interests – not yours.
Because carrier agents are paid by the carriers, your organization’s best interests will always come second. These agents will not jeopardize their relationship with the carriers to battle billing disputes on your behalf.
Telecom Expense Management (TEM) providers
TEM providers can identify some errors in billing, but they cannot spot the anomalies in your bills that an auditing expert can in a deep-dive audit.
We worked with one of the largest healthcare providers in the country while they were using a TEM solution to audit their telecom bills. In a single month, we identified an additional $800,000 in erroneous billing that their TEM provider did not catch.
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