As your company picks up the pace of digital transformation, one of the challenges you may face is an increase in telecoms costs. That’s especially the case if you have a large mobile, remote or hybrid workforce that relies heavily on mobile broadband to get their work done.

But managing mobile telecoms can be a burden, with low visibility into the numerous devices, contracts, and users in your workforce. Many businesses don’t understand what they are paying for and why. Taking a smarter approach to managing mobile expenses can help you to save money that you can reinvest elsewhere in your business.

Cutting edge mobile expense management solutions and practices can help you gain control, simplify operations and automate processes—in turn, helping you to optimise costs. It’s not a matter of slashing entire services completely or making arbitrary cuts. It’s about a smarter way of controlling telecoms usage and costs.

Here is our guide to the five simple steps that can help your business simplify mobile expense management and accelerate ROI from digital transformation:

Assess your environment

Any optimisation journey starts with taking some time to evaluate the status quo and assess where you could make any improvements. Is your existing mobile strategy working for you? Do you have the services and tools you need? As part of this process, you’ll identify any inefficiencies you can improve upon.

Smarter companies perform constant telecom expense audits. A mobile expense audit will help you gain visibility of your mobile fleet. Cutting edge mobile expense management tools can simplify and automate the process of tracking down incorrect charges, wastage and obsolete or unnecessary services.

A cost-benefit analysis of your services will help you figure out where you can reduce telecom expenses while meeting your defined service levels. A knowledgeable mobile expense management partner can help you to get started.

Create a plan

Now that you understand where your shortcomings lie, it’s time to develop a plan. The key to successfully fixing any problems is acknowledging them. Document parts of the business where costs and inefficiencies are high, so that you can create an actionable plan to improve them. This will also help to create accountability.

Trim the fat

With the right mobile expense management solution in place, you can identify billing irregularities, reduce wastage and curb overspending. With the help of a knowledgeable, trusted partner, you can properly document any billing errors, track data pertaining to usage and expenditure, identify any excessive spending and eliminate redundant infrastructure.

Change the culture

Smarter organisations know that they need end-user buy-in to optimise mobile costs. Be sure to collaborate with managers and employees to build a culture of accountability. You will achieve better outcomes when you socialise best practices for managing mobile costs across your business.

For example, educate users about how they can save money for the company by using secure Wi-Fi rather than 5G. And ensure end-users understand that you’re monitoring spending at a departmental and individual level and warn them when they’re approaching their usage limits throughout the month.

Make it a way of life

Mobile expense management is a way of life, not a project. Once your company has put cutting-edge practices and systems in place, you should monitor costs on an ongoing basis and aim to continuously optimise costs and provider performance.

*You don’t need to embark on this journey alone. Get in touch with our knowledgeable experts to learn how we can help your company simplify technology expense management and be smarter about mobile spending.