It is important for any business to keep their overall business overheads to a minimum and this is especially so in a recession such as we are facing at the moment. It is therefore a good idea to look for the best ways to reduce the costs of the business and the amount you are paying for your phone calls is a great place to start. A 25% saving on an £60,000 telecoms bill is more important than working towards a 50% reduction on a £4,500 spend on vending machines.
Prior to carrying on I would like to make you aware that I am by no way involved in this business sector; I am in fact a person who enables people to book cheap holidays.
Length of Contracts – Signing a contract for 1-3 years is good for the telecoms company as reductions don’t have to be passed on and customers cannot benefit from moving to a lower cost provider. Also, if there is a 3-month notice period, who at your organisation will send out the letter to the telecoms company?
Minimum Call Charges and Rounding – Take an example where the headline rate for a local call is 1.5p per minute. Now with a 1p minimum call charge a 20 second call will cost 1p or double the advertised rate. The calls, when rounded up to the closest minute are then three hundred percent higher than what was expected. In addition, 30% of business calls are below 30 seconds and nearly all business calls are under 2 minutes. What impact are these two areas going to have on your telephone bill?
Capped Calls and Cheap calls – Another minefield. With most business calls of less than 2 minutes duration, these calls would be considerably more expensive on a capped call tariff. You may well be shocked to hear that some of the most established companies in the market have a seven pence set up charge with a ten pence per minute rate to mobile phones. So therefore a 1 minute call on this capped call tariff would cost 17p or a 30 second call would cost 12p, considerably more than they would cost on a standard per minute tariff. 90% of businesses on capped calls tariffs are paying much more than they should be paying.
I hope some of the above helps you to gain lower business overheads if needs be you could always contact a business cost reduction specialist. This is something that is becoming ever more popular these days.