Are Your Employees Adequately Informed?

Practically every business with corporate liable mobile devices can point to some recent cases of mobile device usage gone bad.  More often than not it isn’t because the employee was irresponsible or devious, but is due simply to unclear company policies or the lack of visibility to usage of their device.  The stories are numerous. How about the user that didn’t understand mobile billing changes at our national border and that downloading movies in another country can quickly run up thousands of dollars in overage charges?  Or the individual that thought a free account for a satellite radio channel also included the data usage needed for the radio to work on their smartphone.  Or how about the new controller of a company that somehow thought because the device was paid for in full by the company that it therefore must have come with unlimited voice, data and text usage plans.   The financial enforcer in an enterprise doesn’t look good at the top of a mobile abusers list.

Setting, monitoring and enforcing standards and policies for any corporate function are difficult and even more challenging in the mobile arena.  In any discipline, when a user of a service understands the cost implications, it is usually easy to adapt behaviors to fit within acceptable cost guidelines.  With corporate liable devices, the users rarely, if ever, see their costs.  Without a well enumerated policy employees are not likely to understand the impact of a wide variety of usage behaviors.  There are four practical actions that can significantly improve the challenges to this dilemma.

Creating a Mobile Device Policy – There can be a wide range of detail in a mobile device policy and corporate cultures will have a strong influence on the scope of each company’s policy.  An effective approach will include four general components.  First, be clear the employees receiving this business tool understands the reason they have been granted this communication benefit.  Many companies have set criteria that qualify an individual to have a mobile device. This helps emphasize that receiving a mobile device comes with responsibility and that not every employee has the right to use a mobile device.  A clear understanding by the employee that they have been entrusted with an asset that requires some level of discipline from the very start will minimize future misunderstandings.

Second, establish classes of mobile devices (i.e. phones, smartphones, data cards, tablets) with accompanying job criteria indicating which employees are eligible for which device types.  It is no longer sufficient to lump devices together as the gap in cost between low-end flip phones to high-end tablets and smartphones is vast, not only in the initial acquisition charge but in ongoing monthly service fees.  Best practice in this regard is requiring more stringent approval protocols for the tablets, smartphones and even data cards which may entail more management approval stops along the way and/or higher management job titles required for final approval of these more costly device types.

Third, be clear on the boundaries related to device usage.  With the current shift from voice minute-centric billing to data-centric already beginning, having clear guidelines for the business and non-business usage of mobile devices for voice minutes, texting, data and international usage are essential.  Lack of understanding in these areas can create expectation gaps that can be hard to close.  Be sure an expectation is set that there will be monitoring so the employee understands the policy will be reviewed against their usage behavior.

Finally, establish consequences for policy violations. Some leniency may be appropriate for first time offenders but for repeated violators the only way to cause a change of behavior may be through a process of reimbursement for personal usage charges considered beyond policy limits.

Employee Understanding and Acceptance – It is important to have the policy readily available to any mobile device user. It is even more effective to require that an employee indicates they have read and accepted the company policy prior to receiving their initial corporate-liable mobile device.  This acceptance can come via hardcopy signature or a more efficient path would be electronically recorded via a checkbox in an online provisioning workflow process.  An approach requiring employee acceptance is a key aspect of instilling individual responsibility. Because the vast majority of policy violations occur unintentionally your success at broad company compliance will be substantially influenced by the depth of the employee’s understanding of the policy guidelines.

Monitoring Policy Compliance – Without oversight a company policy can be hollow and irrelevant. If you are operating only from a paper bill the process of monitoring will be a significant challenge.  You will be left to randomly sampling users to review from the bills.  A more effective solution would be through automated capabilities of a Mobility Management tool.   A solution such as MobilSentry provides automated alerting to management for usage violations. Regardless of the method, best practice suggests you conduct some level of an annual review of usage with feedback to the employee.  When employees sense an absence of oversight, it can result in a lower level of attention to policy guidelines.

Regularly Reviewing the Policy – What can always be said about mobility is that it does not stay the same.  There is a continuous stream of change that needs to be periodically reviewed against reasonable device use expectations.  An example of a recent change that has had a big impact on some companies is the Hotspot feature on smartphones.  In some companies, this has replaced the need for some individuals who travel frequently to have a second billing device for ready internet access.  Some enterprises have used this cost saving opportunity to rewrite their policies on data card usage.

We have seen companies who have implemented, monitored and enforced well-conceived mobility policy reduce their monthly spend by 2-5%.  This has brought a positive change to their mobility culture and reduced their carrier invoices, in many cases in excess of the cost of a Mobility Management solution.  If you don’t yet have a Mobility Policy, you should make plans today to create one.  The effort will bring clarity, control and cost savings to your mobile device environment.

Some Common Overcharges

Even though billing engines used by wireless carriers today show a level of improved accuracy over older wireline billing applications, the sheer complexity of telecom billing almost guarantees some billing anomalies.  Add the risk associated with keystroke errors on the high volumes of data transactions handled manually by carrier staff and you’ll find there is some opportunity on practically every invoice to uncover disputable charges.

Manual error checking on invoices with hundreds or even thousands of individual devices is tedious and most certainly will produce a negative ROI with more work effort than savings.  Carrier policies of only crediting invoice discrepancies up to six months back also puts bounds on the potential returns of a scrupulous audit of a given invoice.  In our experience, while the magnitude and frequency of invoice errors is relatively small, there seems to be a higher emotional satisfaction of receiving carrier credits for billing overcharges than finding an equivalent savings through rate plan optimization.

Automated solutions are a much more cost-effective approach to identifying charge discrepancies.  Some Enterprise Mobility Management solutions such as MobilSentry perform a comprehensive set of monthly invoice validation checks to highlight areas where carrier credits are likely.  While there are more credit opportunities than these areas listed below, these highlighted areas comprise the more common and costly errors that might occur on wireless invoices.

Overlooked Contract Changes – When you negotiate a new contract with your carrier it may result in new concessions that generate reduced costs on plans or features.  When these contractual changes occur, there is typically a parallel effort required to update wireless device records so they correctly bill at the new rates.  Often these changes are done via batch updates.  In our experience these don’t always go seamlessly and inevitably leave some number of devices still billing at the older rates.  Do not assume that just because a price change is documented in the contract that it will make its way to every applicable device on your invoice. While these overcharges may be small on a given device, the fact that they might be replicated over a range of devices makes finding these errors a lucrative endeavor.

Waived or Reduced Fees – If you have been successful at negotiating reduced or waived activation or termination fees, our experience is that it is not uncommon for some devices to continue to slip through with the full fee.  The carriers will typically move swiftly to apply the needed credits in these cases but they are not in the business of self-monitoring so it will be up to you to surface any overcharges.

Missed Terminations – Perhaps because terminations require manual actions we find it common that the billing charges don’t always vanish from the bill in a timely fashion. When porting between carriers we sometime find the device continues billing on the previous as well as the new carrier.  A sophisticated EMM solution should have the ability to set the status on a device that has been terminated or ported and monitor subsequent months to confirm it is ultimately credited and vanishes from the bill in the expected timeframe.  A smartphone billing two to three months past the expected termination date can quickly add up to hundreds of dollars.

Overcharges on Equipment Purchases – Manual ordering processes can lead to mis-coded credits or discounts on wireless asset purchases.  Identifying these errors can be complicated by the fact that equipment charges may appear on a subsequent invoice to the date that they were ordered and activated.  These charge discrepancies can be sizable given the much higher average cost per device in the smartphone and tablet era.

Discount Errors – Less common but nonetheless rewarding searches can be focused on ensuring that devices are all being charged at the correct discount levels.  These errors are not frequent but can sometimes be instigated by a changing discount schedule with a new contract.

The examples noted above are some of the most common invoice discrepancies that we find for our clients.  Others include incorrect access rates, double feature billing and incorrectly billed taxes.  How comfortable are you that your wireless invoices are free of billing errors?

The Trade-offs Versus Data Pooling

Data pooling has been offered by some carriers for a number of years but the erratic usage patterns of data cards and the painful overage rates have led to a limited acceptance in the marketplace.  The onslaught of iPhones and Smartphones with more predictable data consumption rates along with smaller overage rate penalties have dramatically shifted the balance. It is no longer a question of whether to pool data devices but whether or not all data devices should be pooled.  With the exception of Sprint who utilizes unlimited data as a differentiator from its larger competitors, unlimited data plans are rarely offered except to the largest clients and government entities.

Not long ago unlimited data plans were common place because the carrier bandwidth exceeded the breadth of applications to consume that bandwidth.  If you are lucky enough to still have an unlimited data plan contractually available then you can benefit from the savings that will come from transitioning data users back and forth between pooled and unlimited as their usage patterns dictate.  However, for most it now becomes a question of leaving behind that grandfathered unlimited plan and moving permanently to data pooling.

So when is it cost-effective to let go of the security of an unlimited plan to benefit from a lower cost pooled data plan?  What cost differential is worth paying the price for the potential downstream need for unlimited data on a given device?  Is any price worth it when you are trading off quantifiable savings today for a potential need in the future?

There are three primary factors in determining whether to permanently relinquish a grandfathered unlimited data card plan.

The Premium Monthly Cost for Unlimited – The largest factor in deciding to retain an unlimited data card plan is the delta you are paying monthly over a comparable pooled plan option.  If the differential in price is relatively small and you have some devices with a history of exceeding 10GB in monthly usage then it makes sense to retain an unlimited plan but only in those limited cases.  If the delta in price is large ($10+) then the sound financial decision will be to opt for the monthly savings and let the spikes be managed via buffers you retain in your data pool.

History of Usage for the Devices in Question – It is difficult to make decisions regarding the appropriate plans without the ability to track historical usage.  Preferably you would have 12 months of history regarding all data card usage.  Sustained usage of 20GB or greater on a data card may indicate that the card is being used for more than business purposes and may require appropriate action to curtail usage rather than pay a premium for an unlimited plan.  More justifiable instances for retaining unlimited plans might come in cases where the data card shows intermittent spikes of usage reflective of periodic travel by an employee.  If these spikes are sizable although irregular then avoiding overage charges in those months may more than cover a modest monthly premium associated with the unlimited plan versus a comparable pool plan option.

Mix of Data Pool Devices and Available Buffer – The larger the device count in a pool, the more easily it will be to absorb random data card spikes underneath a controlled excess buffer.  The greater the percentage in that pool of smartphones versus data cards, the more likely your monthly average usage will be near 2GB/device versus 5GB/device.  If you overall average is approaching the upper plan size of 5GB/device you will experience less flexibility to retain sufficient buffer to absorb data usage spikes over time and the more important it might be to retain some unlimited plans on high usage devices.

Because of the new cost-effectiveness of data pooling and group data sharing, now may be the time to finally move away from legacy unlimited data plans.