Reviewing the various summary tables in the front of your monthly bills will provide you with some useful indications about your usage and spending, even total spending per connection, but in most cases, you will need the details of your fully itemised bill. The bill for a business with 50 connections often runs to as many as 150 pages. It’s hard to see the wood for the trees: you would need to review row upon row of data to find the reasons for incremental charges, whether from excess UK data usage, international calls or roaming data charges. contract

One consequence of the ease with which businesses slip into a high tariff is that a shockingly large number of SMEs are paying not merely over the odds, but massively so. An astonishing 49% of businesses pay not just more than they need but more than double what they need.

One likely reason for the higher prices paid by SMEs is that the network operators do not publish all available tariffs for business customers, and what tariffs they publish are difficult to find and even harder to compare. As an individual, you can browse phones and tariffs at the click of a website; as a business customer, you have only a limited range of plan prices available online, and the details get more sparse as the number of connections you require increases.

The business plans you can see on the operator’s website won’t necessarily include the cheapest for your pattern of usage. Moreover, the plan details are often spread across many different web pages and interleaved with information on the services offered, relevant and helpful in itself but distracting if you are aiming to compare tariffs.

Only 7% of businesses are on the right telecom contract

Billmonitor analysis shows that savings do not come from one simple and easy-to-learn trick but from diverse and hard-to-predict sources.

For micro SMEs, some 69% of savings come from reducing the cost of tariffs and bundles. For SMEs with 10 or more connections, some 49% of savings are from reducing tariffs and bundles and 10% from increasing UK data allowances.

Reusing or terminating connections accounts for a further 19% of total savings. Businesses with international activities can save by optimising roaming bundles and through bundles for calling abroad.

In practice, savings are often interlinked. Nowadays all networks offer plans and tariffs that include free international minutes or favorable roaming costs. These plans can provide great value for money, but should only be purchased for users who would really benefit.

The big savings come from negotiating the right telecom contract, not switching networks

One measure of the relative importance of knowing what to ask for, against simply shopping around, is that the majority of businesses can achieve savings of 42% by negotiating the right telecom contract with the current network, almost as much as the typical savings potential of 49%.

Switching networks adds no more than an extra seven percentage points.

With outsourcing TEM service, your company will get more visibility into those expenses, will make significant savings and will have more time to do your core business.

As your outsourced telecom partner, we check all your invoices, and your current contract, find errors and sufficient services, renegotiate your telecom contract etc. To achieve this, we use special software that allows us to confirm the validity of payments and analyze the entire telecom costs for current improvements. Making such an analysis only through an Excel spreadsheet is simply impossible.

You will receive a monthly report indicating areas for potential savings on telecommunications services, and a concrete proposal able to optimize for specific items, identify billing discrepancies, unnecessary costs (lines that are not being used – zero usage, excessive or insufficient telecom contracted tariffs, data usage, roaming suggestions, etc.) ad’hoc analytical services, consumption statistics, the biggest consumers etc.