5 Best Practices for Telecom Expense Management for Global Enterprises

Today’s business landscape is interconnected and complex — and the ability to communicate effectively with customers and employees is critical to the success of your organization. Effective communication involves touching base regularly with customers, coordinating projects daily with remote or hybrid teams and ensuring all stakeholders are leveraging capable technology for an excellent digital experience.

Telecom expense management (TEM) is the key to managing good communication strategically. TEM is defined as a collection of services, technologies and processes that help businesses manage their telecommunications costs and assets.

There is a lot to consider when managing expenses for telecommunications. Let us dive into a few ways you can optimize your TEM.

Here are five best practices for you to reduce complexity and increase the effectiveness and cost-savings for TEM.

1. Ensure that you have accurate inventory.
   
   Knowing with certainty that your inventory is accurate is one of the most important phases of establishing a TEM program. So, what are some methods to help accomplish this?
   
   If you are using only invoices to build your inventory, stop; this method is not only outdated, but risks inevitable inaccuracies. Instead, use multiple sources via vendor portals to help find contracts as well as anomalies upfront.
   
   Establish an inventory management checklist to ensure all your mobile devices and networking equipment are accounted for and being used properly. This includes tracking term dates, mobile policies, metrics unique to business goals and specifics on the onboarding and offboarding for all end users.
   
   You’d be surprised how many companies haven’t completed an audit in six months or longer. This coupled with carriers constantly changing plans, sometimes monthly, creates an environment that’s easy to lose track of without a strong inventory practice.
   
   
2. Standardize telecom policies across regions.
   
   Some companies have locations across the globe, and it’s common for these companies to face obstacles related to management structures that are not unified. When dealing with global enterprises, different languages and currencies can make it tricky and frustrating for companies to manage internally.
   
   Aggregating everything under a single policy or management structure, as much as possible, is the goal here. Therefore, it’s crucial to work with vendors who understand the need for this kind of standardization.
   
   By partnering with a trusted TEM vendor that can help determine if internal policies are in compliance and promote good governance, you can establish a precedence for your organization to achieve success anywhere in the world.
   
   
3.  Optimize remote work and telecom expenses.
   
   In optimizing remote work and telecom expenses, the end goal is really to reduce overall costs. Doing so requires doing your due diligence, including renegotiating contracts, offloading unused devices and consolidating applicable accounts.
   
   From a mobility standpoint, you will also want to simplify the process of ordering devices as well as creating help-desk tickets that are resolved quickly. End-user support ranges from break fixes to helping people troubleshoot on smartphones, and more.
   
   
4. Leverage AI tools for time- and cost-savings.
   
   Telecom generally accounts for top line items on global company budgets, so it’s no wonder that it’s a vast and extremely complex area to optimize. Implementing artificial intelligence to do some of this heavy lifting by automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks can make a huge financial impact in the long run.
   
   With so much data that needs to be analyzed within TEM, AI can be trained to identify anomalies and overcharges within your inventory, saving your human agents time and stress. And with machine learning capabilities that can generate recommendations, leveraging AI can be the pivotal shift your organization enacts to work smarter, not harder.
   
   
5. Use a TEM platform.
   
   Everything boils down to following a sound strategy around TEM — and having a provider that can deliver on business goals and reduce expenses to improve your lines of customer experience is where you want to be.
   
   There are a bevy of TEM providers available, so before you dive in with anyone, do your research and determine your order of priorities. Different TEM providers have different strengths, so if your organization is large and global, be discerning and choose wisely.

At CDW, our solutions architects’ experience working with a variety of TEM providers means that we can match customers with the best people to get the job done on any timeline.

Few providers have the capacity and resources to support especially large enterprises. With our industry-leading handle on the TEM pulse, we can guide you toward viable solutions that elevate your overall digital experience.