The first question on the agenda when quoting telecom services is what the customer presently has for services and how much they are paying for those services.
I would like to begin this New Year by informing you about some telephone and bandwidth services, and ideas, that could help you. But these ideas can't help if you don't know about them, or haven't given them a thought, or if you have not ever wondered how they work.
To begin I would like to draw a comparison of telecommunications services to the commercial real estate market. When looking for a business site the prescription for success is location, location, location!
If you stop to consider your telecom expenses when you are about to move your business site, location is also a significant consideration because of access to the latest technology. It's also a time when you should be looking at your telecom plans to reduce your telecom expenses with newer technology. And because you already assessed your present services with vendor management, invoice auditing, and telecom service procurement options it should be easy, right?
On the other hand, if you have avoided planning your telecom inventory for years, your guesses could be wildly inaccurate and your organization could have no true enterprise-level telecom expense control going on. In short, you don't know what you don't know. What you need are answers.
So, start gathering data now, regardless of whether you are moving or not. This means looking at everything you've got including landlines, data circuits, wireless devices, and all other telecom services for which you are billed.
After you have all the data together, life starts getting a lot easier. You'll have easy answers to telecom expense questions and renewal options and winning IT decisions. Paying telecom invoices will be friendlier because you will be sure that what you are paying for is what you need.
The best part of accomplishing this task is that you will have a visible, working knowledge of your present telecom position and a plan to lower your future expenses. When it is time to expand, and the need for new telecom decisions arise, your equipment and service purchases will be orderly and you will be asking for what you need rather then what someone is going to sell you out of the box. You won't need to scramble through what you don't know because you know you already know.
