How To Have Lower Phone Costs
Know what costs to reduce –Reducing costs is sometimes just a percentage game with a focus on the areas of main expenditure. A 25% saving on an £60,000 telecoms bill is more important than working towards a 50% reduction on a £4,500 spend on vending machines.
Prior to carrying on I would like to make you aware that I am by no way involved in this business sector; I am in fact a stuttering therapy coach.
Length of Contracts – Signing a contract for 1-3 years is good for the telecoms company as reductions don’t have to be passed on and customers cannot benefit from moving to a lower cost provider. Also, if there is a 3-month notice period, who at your organisation will send out the letter to the telecoms company?
Minimum Call Charges and Rounding – Take an example where the headline rate for a local call is 1.5p per minute. Now with a 1p minimum call charge a 20 second call will cost 1p or double the advertised rate. The calls, when rounded up to the closest minute are then three hundred percent higher than what was expected. In addition, 30% of business calls are below 30 seconds and nearly all business calls are under 2 minutes. What impact are these two areas going to have on your telephone bill?
Capped Calls and Cheap Calls – Another minefield. With most business calls of less than 2 minutes duration, these calls would be considerably more expensive on a capped call tariff. You may well be shocked to hear that some of the most established companies in the market have a seven pence set up charge with a ten pence per minute rate to mobile phones. Without even going too deeply into the mathematics of it all you can no doubt see just how much more than they cost on the standard rate. 90% of businesses on capped calls tariffs are paying much more than they should be paying.
I hope some of the above helps you to gain lower business overheads.
Tags: business calls, call charges, cheap calls, Minimum Call Charges, vending machines