Telecommunications is a vital part of a successful business, helping connect suppliers, employees and clients. To get the most value from your company’s investment, you need telecom expense management (TEM) practices that fit your unique requirements and business goals. Evaluating the effectiveness and returns of your current TEM can help you optimize future strategies and move your business’s telecom forward.
Are you wondering how to accurately measure your return on investment (ROI) while reducing telecom costs? When managing key systems at your facility, the right solutions can help you get maximum ROI and operational efficiency for mobile devices. Addressing the various challenges of managing telecom is an integral part of building your strategy. Follow our tips for maximizing ROI to help you get more from your telecom investments.
What Is ROI and Why Is It Important?
ROI is the total investment value you receive back from your operations. Directly measuring the benefit of an investment against its overall cost, this metric is the ratio of investment cost divided by the return.
To effectively measure, a business must consider all investment costs and profits. This percentage can help you compare investment value for different projects by examining initial outlay and net profit. It’s a tool to evaluate profitability and efficiency for various projects, workflows and tools.
What Are Telecom Expenses?
Global telecom service expenses are projected to be 1.595 trillion dollars by 2024, as communications continue to be a vital part of day-to-day business operations. Companies require telecom solutions to keep operations running across different industries and markets. This considerable spending is a crucial investment companies make to network between various stakeholders, team members, clients and vendors, and spending continues growing to meet these service needs.
Telecom costs essentially cover everything you may spend on communication tools and services. These expenses include wired and wireless telephone services fees. Any equipment you operate, such as mobile communication devices, is also part of your total investment. Your expenses for a company internet connection, business cell phone plans and similar costs are also factors.
Why Does Your ROI Matter?
To accurately capture returns on your business operations, evaluate external costs for outside services, internal costs and compliance expenses. Telecommunications will broadly encompass servicing costs from carriers, but your internal operating costs and compliance also affect total investment profits.
ROI is a critical part of managing your business and getting the most value back from the time and resources you put into your company. In many cases, ROI is a primary metric to evaluate an initiative’s overall success, so getting maximum returns is a priority across your enterprise. When it comes to telecommunications, ensure your investments make the right impact. Finding ways to reduce costs, choose automation and understand current telecom expenses can help you get more from your systems.
How Does Telecom Impact ROI?
Telecom is a critical aspect of your business, significantly impacting your overall ROI. The price of your telecom billing charges compared to your sales ratio can help you identify the effectiveness of your communications services. Consequently, telecom cost management is an increasingly leading concern for businesses across industries, with the global TEM market projected to grow 18% from 2017 rates by 2023.
Telecom’s Influence on Profits
These services’ effectiveness in meeting essential communication needs between employees, teams and departments, clients and other vendors can shape your profits. It can also affect the timeliness and clarity of information delivery between parties involved in your business operations. Your telecom investments should drive sales and revenue results that successfully outperform your billing expenses.
Every piece of equipment, technological tool and service you invest in is part of your business’s ROI. Your devices significantly impact client and vendor relationships and can affect your team’s ability to collaborate. The more effective your external and internal communications, the more effective your organization will be as a whole. Strong communication can naturally lead to higher profits across your business, whatever your industry.
Why Managing Expenses Can Be Challenging
Understanding your company’s telecom costs and how they affect ROI can help you troubleshoot, identify inefficiencies and implement best practices for your enterprise. Telecom management can bring unique challenges — errors in billing that benefit the carrier are more common than you might expect. Many companies unknowingly pay for a range of unauthorized charges for services they aren’t using.
Tracking these charges can be complex and time-consuming, so many enterprises don’t have the time or resources to stay ahead of excessive costs. How you manage these costs and track unexpected charges can significantly impact your organization’s ROI. You can lose significant money on payments for services or packages you don’t need. You could also be paying more money than required for telecom operations to automate more productively.
You need the right strategy to help you handle these considerations.
Advantages of Optimized ROI
If you’re considering your current ROI and want to improve it, you can bring many advantages to your business. When you consider telecom’s impact on ROI, implementing best practices can affect your business organization-wide. Optimizing your ROI evaluation and improvement systems can build your profits and set you up for long-term success.
Establishing the right systems for optimized ROI management can offer your enterprise benefits such as:
- Better profitability measurements: You can more effectively evaluate your current profitability by implementing a system that accurately measures and optimizes ROI.
- More effective goal-setting: Choosing best practices to improve your ROI also helps you maintain a better view of your entire organization. You’ll be able to more effectively identify growth areas and pursue improvement with the right goals.
- Optimized comparative analysis: An optimized ROI metric will help you identify asset utilization and profitability if you need to compare different business units. You can then make more informed decisions about your next steps.
- More development resources: With an increased revenue stream and cost-efficient processes, you’ll have more resources available to develop and grow your company further.
Whatever your business goals, prioritizing telecom management can give you the tools to improve your ROI, organizational efficiency and operational success. It’s a worthwhile investment for your enterprise at any stage of development.
What Are the 3 Keys to Maximizing ROI?
How can you get the most from your investments and turn those resources into profits?
If you want maximum profitability for your company, you’ll need to keep three fundamental principles in mind. When you implement these best practices, you can measure your current telecom ROI more accurately and get the most value from your investment.
1. Visibility
Your company’s first step to getting maximum ROI is maintaining complete visibility across your organization. In-depth data analysis and tracking capabilities are increasingly important for enterprises developing their TEM systems in today’s market.
Along with tracking your spending and budgeting, monitor change management and service inventory. Manage ongoing trend analysis of vendors, budgeting details, locations and services. This information will help you understand where your investment money is going and why. You’ll also more readily notice unusual charges or unauthorized service fees.
As you prioritize your telecom expense management visibility, set key performance benchmarks. Note benchmarks and performance indicators of other similar enterprises to help you target areas for your company’s improvement and development. With a clear set of goals, you can more strategically monitor your services and management effectiveness.
2. Control
To continue developing your expense management system and optimize telecom processes, maintain strategic process control. Implement controls for service inventory, change management and the operations in between to help you stay ahead of the workflow. With practical measures, you can ensure approval policies and standards maintenance are clear and consistent across your organization.
Have a thorough process for ensuring quality and productivity throughout your teams. Managing each level of operations effectively with consistent controls will help you maintain optimal standards for your company’s communications and services. You’ll be able to minimize waste and inefficiencies while targeting operational obstacles with the proper protocol and control measures.
3. Automation
Market research indicates that IT integration in telecom is a leading trend for automation. Increasing numbers of companies are choosing to automate their telecom requirements for more efficient and cost-effective operations.
Automation in telecom involves using IT and robotic process automation solutions to process transactional data, order creation and other vital requirements more effectively. Various telecom processes can be efficiently managed through automation, such as responding to partner queries and cutting down on costly manual information processing.
Implementing automation for your telecom operations can help cut operational costs and increase your organization’s profits. It can improve overall productivity while helping meet client and vendor needs more efficiently.
Steps to Ensure You Measure Your Business’s ROI Accurately
Taking accurate ROI measurements for your business can help you target specific improvement needs and build practical goals. To help you develop a successful strategy for analyzing ROI, track your current processes and have a clear system in place for evaluating your data.
Follow these steps to help you get accurate ROI analysis and move your business forward.
1. Create Visibility
Visibility is your crucial first step to accurate and effective ROI measurement. You need to understand your current state of ROI to measure against as you continue to improve your organization’s processes. Maintain comprehensive visibility across your teams and processes. Manage data normalization to get an accurate picture of your current operational effectiveness. It’s also advisable to categorize your monitoring practices for more full-scope visibility.
Organize your management by categories such as:
- Location
- Budget center
- Region
- Service type
- Vendor
- Function
2. Review
As you manage telecom expenses, maintain structured, consistent reviews for your current servicing terms and bills. Ensure you have the personnel to evaluate regular contract terms and conditions and pay careful attention to any unauthorized services added in. A thorough evaluation of the contract conditions from the beginning will help prevent unnecessary costs from creeping into your bills unnoticed. A baseline telecom audit can help with this as well.
Ensure all applied charges have a reason and are included in your company’s desired servicing package for telecommunications. Rationalization to help optimize company efficiency may also be an important consideration throughout the review process. Identify ways your business can reevaluate current strategies and continue improving.
3. Develop a Strategy
Creating the right strategy can help you reach a projected return successfully and efficiently. Start with solution and vendor evaluation, considering your options and determining what best fits your current capabilities and future goals. You’ll then want to start consolidation, identifying the best terms and pricing for the services you need.
Create a technology roadmap to evaluate your current state, servicing needs and envisioned future capabilities. With a clear plan for moving forward, you can target current growth areas and begin to improve your entire workflow.
4. Implement
Once you have an agreed-upon strategy in place, you can move toward implementation. Establish consistent protocols and controls to optimize your TEM management. Incorporate automation IT solutions that can help increase overall process efficiency and set up reviews to oversee your servicing charges. Establish yourself with vendors offering the best pricing and services for your telecom needs.
Cost Management Group offers trusted service management and managed migration services if you’re looking for implementation solutions. We can support you in changing current management systems and getting better value from your systems. A seamless implementation process with the right software and procedures in place can help you begin improving ROI sooner.
5. Maintain
After implementing your system, establish a long-term plan for effective maintenance and growth. The secret to maximizing your ROI far into the future is consistently maintaining an optimal telecom environment. With the right strategy, you’ll continue getting maximized profits from your critical telecom investments.
You can take several steps to help maintain your systems’ efficiency and quality controls. Calculate your current state ROI regularly and evaluate how you can continue to improve your current process. Measure, control and improve as you maintain high operating standards and prioritize efficiency. When you continuously focus on process improvements, you’ll be able to increase profitability.
Put resources into ongoing reconciliation, service tracking and rationalization to monitor your progress. Your data will help you troubleshoot and continue to pinpoint areas for improvement.
Work With Us to Reduce Costs and Maximize Your ROI
At Cost Management Group, we offer solutions to help you optimize your TEM strategies and maximize your overall ROI. Our results-oriented, software-driven services can help you improve visibility and profitability across your enterprise, empowering you to improve efficiency and reach more clients. Whatever your operating requirements, partner with us to get the solutions you need for your business.
We’re proud to maintain long-term relationships with our clients as a trusted partner for your cost management needs. Our differentiating factor is our employees, who focus on outstanding services for every client. To help you save on your day-to-day operational processes and get the most from your resource investments, choose Cost Management Group.
If you’re interested in learning more about our services, reach out to us today.