Fine print

Fine print

Mastering the details of telecom bills can lead to big savings

by Beth Ewen   Nita Singh founded her company, American Business Communication Inc., to help business customers sort through the confusion after regulators broke up Ma Bell — the “telecom bomb,” as Singh describes it. More than a decade later, it’s grown to 18 employees and annual revenue of $3.5 million, and Singh says confusion still reigns. She tells Upsize how to guard against “bill creep,” how to save money on your wireless plan, and why next time you might want to chuck your PBX.

Upsize: You’ve seen many changes in telecom offerings for small business. What are the latest developments?

Nita Singh: Having worked in this area for 14 years, in the last couple of years the technology is taking off but the carriers are cutting back services. The small-business owners are having to fend for themselves. This is not just happening to the little guy. It’s happening to the big guy, too. It opens up an arena for a third party like ABC. We can see how telecom is being optimized in your organization.

Upsize: How widespread are the service cuts?

Singh: Ever since the telecom bomb, the dollars are being cut from support. Let’s say your lines go down. You are going to be going to a Web site and servicing that yourself. It requires some degree of telecom savvy.

Upsize: What are you looking for when you start the process with clients?

Singh: The very first thing we do is to audit. You don’t put new stuff on top of stuff already broken. We look at every phone bill, every bill that’s related to telecom, and analyze it. That includes when you pick up the phone, and when you think of your computer as it’s hooked up to the Internet. Those two technologies have converged, voice and data.

Upsize: I understand that’s another topic.

Singh: Let’s stick to those bills. We’re looking at Internet access bills, frame relay charges, teleconferencing, calling cards. We look at how you utilize your telecom services. We create that profile and then go back and say, “How are you using all those things?”

Then we go to the contracts to ask, “Are you getting what you paid for, and are you optimizing that?” Yes, you might have paid for A and are getting A, and that’s the good news. The bad news is you need B.

Upsize: What’s next?

Singh: After the auditing piece, there’s renegotiating contracts. Our staff is aware of all the clauses. Vendors will say we can’t change that clause, but we know when you can. Then there’s procurement, buying a service or technology. We’ll do the request for proposal. And fourth is telemanagement.

Upsize: What are your clients focusing on the most right now?

Singh: The real buzz is, people are realizing that they cannot rely that their bills are accurate. The bills are so confusing. Ninety perent of all telecom bills contain errors. Companies are paying 35 percent more than they need to. People spend 20 percent of their time trying to find errors, and 80 percent of the time trying to resolve them.

Upsize: What’s an example?

Singh: One client said, “We think we’re doing a good job on checking bills.” We found they’d been overbilled by a million dollars. What was happening was “bill creep.” Accounts payable people are taught that if the bill is close to last time, pay it. The VP said, “I just assumed we were growing.”  We find in small business, the mentality is the same. That’s the devil in this. You have to pull customer service reports and match penny by penny.

Upsize: Are there other common areas with extra charges?

Singh: Commonly a user has multiple lines and they’re in “hunt.” That means if the line is busy it rolls over to the next line. I can’t tell you how often that last line has the hunting feature, and it’s not hunting because there are no other lines. It’s small, but those things add up.

Another example, we had a client with multiple locations. It’s a home improvement company. They were approving payments for 12 lines, but I knew they had six. The way the bill was coming, it was a lump sum. It didn’t say how many lines they had. They had downsized. We went back four years and found the paperwork when they had cut the number of lines.

Those are the things small business needs to be on top of.

Upsize: What can companies do about their cellular bills?

Singh: Companies often ask, should they do this in-house and manage it via corporate, or should each employee have their own plan and expense the company? Cellular companies make money in overages and underages.  You may be over-buying a plan, so you have 500 minutes but only use 200, or under-buying, so you are using more than the plan and paying astronomical prices for those minutes.

We find there are savings to be had by pulling these plans in house and getting shared minutes, and then you have control. When we dig into it we find you can cut in half the cost of a cell plan by bringing it in house.

Upsize: What about Internet access?

Singh: It’s less approachable globally. Internet access is a moving target depending on the business. Are you technologically driven, or not? You can have a large manufacturing facility with 100 employees, but their telecom spending would be less than our target client, or you can be a very small business and yet have major technology needs.

Upsize: How much do your target clients spend on telecom?

Singh: We’re dipping into the small to mid-sized companies. If you’re not spending at least $10,000 on telecom on a monthly basis, you probably can’t get the bang for services like ours.

Upsize: So you really get into this telecom stuff.

Singh: It’s a disease, and within the telecom industry people say you either have the telecom bug or you don’t. I started off in telecom in 1983, with Allnet, climbing the corporate ladder. I was running their Minneapolis office. The telecom providers had created so much confusion in the marketplace. In 1989 and ’90 AT&T and MCI were running full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal, calling each other liars. It occurred to me at that point that they needed a small-business advocate.

Upsize: What about confusion today? It is more or less than then?

Singh: It’s even more. You could correlate our company’s growth with the confusion. Also, as the technology continues to evolve, the question is, is it the right way to go for your firm? The technology companies are being motivated to implement their new products. Buyers can be pulled into that.

Upsize: You mentioned earlier the problem of adding new products to old products that don’t work.

Singh: What we find a lot with all the merger and acquisition activity, is companies buy problems and then implement a solution over the problem. There’s nobody there to say, are the old services working? It’s become a plug-and-play environment. We had one customer, one organization purchased another. We realized that when the new organization was purchased the circuits were not even disconnected. It boggles the mind.

Upsize: Cellular numbers recently became portable.

Singh: Isn’t that awesome? I’m happy about that. Any time you have portability it’s a boon for the customer. If you hire a new sales person, someone who wanted to keep their number because all their contacts know it, now you can still bring that person into your corporate plan.

Upsize: Back to the merging of voice and data.

Singh (calling in a colleague to provide details): This is the big buzzword, voice over the Internet. There’s truly putting your voice on the Internet, and there’s putting your voice on your local area network, so you’re transporting your voice on the same cables that are connecting your LAN.

You have to evaluate if it’s right for you. There could be big cost savings here, particularly if you’re in the market for a new system, have multiple sites, or plan a major expansion. 

Nita Singh is president of American Business Communication Inc. in Maple Grove: 763.416.1100; ns****@******om.com