On the plane to Vegas…
I was on a US Airways flight and saw a great ad for GotVmail.com. One of the things that I liked about the product is that it also included call accounting in its list of features while aggregating a bunch of services that would normally be a pain to acquire on an individual basis. Any business phone service that can provide Virtual PBX with extensions, voicemail and fax distribution, and itemized call detail is definitely providing some useful options for individual telecom expense management. If only there were companies that could provide all this on a corporate level... Sure, we have unified communications, call accounting, telecom expense management, and all sorts of other technical solutions for sorting our communications, but it's still not all available as one consolidated bundle. Yet.
Although something like GotVMail is great for the individual user, telecom quickly descends into a morass of complicated invoicing that is hard to manage. From an enterprise level, it's not as important to get a TEM solution until you start getting into thousands of line items and a couple hundred thousand in telecom spend. Unfortunately, a lot of companies find that they reach this level of complexity with only a few hundred employees. With some of the more granular solutions available to the SMB market now, there are definitely available options that can save significant money to those with the time to explore their telecom expenses.
But there are a few things the keep in mind when looking for a TEM solution, especially if you're an SMB:
- Who's going to be maintaining this solution? The biggest problem that I see is that the TEM solution is treated as a complete solution to manage everything. But so much depends on a good employee trained with job skills to handle the solution. Often, the telecom employees don't have a sufficient accounting background, the accounting people lack the database background, and the database people lack the telecom knowledge. It's a vicious cycle that leads to only being able to partially handle telecom spend. No matter how quickly you can analyze your telecom spend, doing stupid things faster will just put you further into the morass of telecom expenses.
- Is there a solid ROI story here? At this point, any company with over a few hundred employees should be able to find an ROI story for TEM. However, in analyzing the ROI, it's important to calculate costs such as the internal evaluation period and discussion, the resources taken off of production or core business functions to evaluate, and the future value of the funds that would be used for the TEM. If you have a super-talented telecom analyst who has costs under control and can handle expenses from a multi-faceted perspective, it might not be worth your while. Or you might want to see if your super-analyst might be able to add more value by looking at other strategic or implementation issues, especially if you're a small company. TEM is as much about freeing up resources to provide value-added services as it is about accurate invoice processing and cross-charging.
- Is the solution you're considering a solution that has been proven in the marketplace? There are a ton of TEM providers out there and frankly, not all of them have a proven record of success or a patented, patent-pending, or licensed solution to provide to end users. ROIs and cost savings models don't mean much if you choose a company that fundamentally can't deliver or won't be in business a year from now and can't support you. Make sure you're not choosing a fly-by-night vendor and do your due diligence. After all, TEM is a decision to put a significant percentage of your company's expenses under the watch of a third-party either as a software solution or a business process outsourcing solution. Either way, you should trust your solution just as much as you'd trust your own telecom and finance employees. You're effectively adding at least one employee's worth of work and value to the company, so you should make your background checks accordingly.
