The Bottom Line

In a perfect world, you would never have to review a phone bill. Service providers would always bill you at the right rate and would only charge you for service you actually ordered. And you would get your bills fully itemized in an easy-to-use electronic format that let you easily perform departmental charge backs and pinpoint employee abuse.

But it’s not a perfect world. You can get “slammed” (i.e., have the long-distance carrier for a local line changed without your consent) at any time. You can also get “crammed.” That’s when your service provider sneaks charges for “inside wire maintenance” or “Web advertising” onto your bill. Those charges might only be a few dollars—but if you multiply those small monthly numbers by several hundred or several thousand lines 12 times a year, you can quickly rack up six-figure problems.

Unfortunately, many telecom managers are just too busy and/or don’t have the staff to closely review their phone bills. Many companies get numerous paper bills each month, so it would take a couple of full-time employees to spot billing anomalies, even if they were easy to find. Most bills aren’t very user-friendly, so it takes a bit of doing to find erroneous charges.

Rip-offs are bad enough in good times. In tough times, waste is even less tolerable. That’s why a growing number of companies are turning to third-party bill-review services to detect problems and improve telecom accounting. In fact, one executive at such a service told me that he fielded more inquiries in the first two months of 2002 than he did in all of 2001.

There are several reasons for the growing popularity of these services. First, companies are more interested than ever in trimming even a few percentage points of cost from their monthly bills. If you can pay 2% of your monthly expenses to achieve a 6% bill reduction, you’re 4% ahead of the game—which isn’t bad if there is little or no effort involved on your part.

Second, you can save money outsourcing bill processing, even if you don’t find a dime in erroneous charges. After all, every bill requires such tasks as routing, keying and check-cutting. If you get a lot of bills, that can cost you a few grand a year. Even worse, if you don’t get those checks cut fast enough, you can wind up paying all kinds of exorbitant late fees. With an outsourced service, all the work is eliminated—and you’re off the hook for those fees.

Service providers have better software for pinpointing common billing errors, such as multiple calls of the exact same duration to the exact same destination being billed at the exact same time. You can also give them the business information they need to spot illegitimate phone use, such as those two-hour calls to some Third-World capital at 2 a.m.

It’s important to distinguish between a monthly service and a one-time audit. One-time audits can be worthwhile, but they don’t help you with new problems that pop up the next month—or old ones that reappear. An ongoing service relieves your company of all the tasks associated with bill review. Plus, some service providers also offer a variety of attractive value-added services, such as Web-based usage reporting and departmental/project charge-back calculations.

As companies continue to pursue ways to become more resource-efficient and to offload nonstrategic tasks, bill-review services are likely to become even more popular. Services that work off of a percentage of realized savings may be particularly attractive, since they eliminate risk from the investment entirely.

If you haven’t shopped for such a service yet, I’d suggest doing so. And let me know how it turns out. I’m always looking for another money-saving anecdote to add to “The Bottom Line” files.

Liebmann is an independent consultant specializing in the application of networking technologies to strategic business challenges. Send comments for publication to liebmann@comnews.com.