Forrester, in a survey of 303 business decision makers commissioned by Cisco, found that the vast majority of enterprises, nearly 90 percent, ending up with overage charges on their bills each year. telecom overcharges

Lacking real-time usage tracking and visibility during billing cycles, businesses resort to billing disputes to try to adjust their bills, causing a headache for both customers and their wireless providers. What is even worse is that some companies are paying for cellular service that they never use. Nearly 20 percent of corporate-owned devices go completely unused.

In managing a mobile workforce, subscription costs such as monthly telecom bills and overages are a central expense. But those costs make up only 33% of the typical overall mobility budget, according to Forrester’s survey findings.

The primary challenges driving up mobility TCO costs include:

• Manual processes – With too few self-serve, online tools and no way to automate processes, both you and your business customers need to invest more staff and more time to handle thousands of mobile device and service changes every month.
• Domestic and roaming overages – Without real-time visibility to monitor usage during the billing cycle, your customers may frequently be hit with unexpected charges. Nearly 90% of companies see overages on their bills every year, resulting in billing disputes, credit backs and lower NPS scores for you.
• Unused devices – Lack of visibility into usage also means your business customers may be paying for deployed mobile devices that aren’t getting used. Forrester found nearly 20% of devices go unused on average.
• Costs of third-party tools – While telecom expense management (TEM) or managed mobility services (MMS) vendors alleviate part of a company’s internal support burden, they add to the already high mobility TCO. High TEM/MMS costs are the second biggest challenge in reducing mobility TCO, per Forrester.

Whether your enterprise employees  run up heavy mobile data usage, travel into new regions or countries, or leave the company, ALERT telecom expense management services can help you dramatically lower your company mobility TCO.

Last month, IDC predicted that worldwide mobility hardware, software and services spending would reach $1.58 trillion in 2017 and $1.72 trillion in 2021. Mobile connectivity services will be the biggest money-maker ($950 billion) in that year, followed by hardware and software.

Although consumers will account for most of the total haul (70 percent), businesses will play an important role in propelling the industry forward, particularly banks, professional services firms and construction companies.

The largest technology category will be mobility services, which will account for roughly 60% of all mobility spending throughout the forecast. While mobile connectivity services will be the largest spending segment at $950 billion in 2021, enterprise mobile services will be one of the fastest growing segments with a 15.3% CAGR. Hardware will be the second largest technology category, led by smartphone purchases.

telecom overcharges