How can you achieve life cycle support?
Many larger companies assume that they will get this support by consolidating with a carrier. The problem is, this type of support does not exist with the carrier. They do not have the people and systems in place to provide the kind of support you would provide to your clients. This is a truth many companies learn the hard way. As a result, the primary option large companies have used to contend with this gap in service has been to build an in-house department — adding tremendous cost and infrastructure. What large corporations really need is a bridge between themselves and the carrier. Consider using a vendor-neutral telecom management application that holds carriers accountable and allows for customized life-cycle management tailored to fit the specific needs of your organization. It’s a tremendous advantage to have one centralized database that manages multiple carriers, streamlines the processes, tracks all the trouble tickets and billing issues, and builds a process for how the customers communicate internally and with their facilities.
The result is powerful. Instead of coordinating MACDs, new installs, billing issues and trouble tickets through Excel spreadsheets, a vendor management portal can provide transparent oversight of what every vendor is doing with your account. With advanced metrics and reporting, you can have a real-time window into the actions on your inventory. With a single point of contact, nothing slips through the cracks, ensuring that every service change, billing dispute and new trouble is accounted for.
When you combine these types of tools with the right relationships, you see things that would never occur in the market as we know it. You get access to all the carriers’ rates, along with a team providing technical, administrative and billing support for the life of the service, regardless of the carrier(s) you choose. And most of all, you get accountability. When the carrier makes a mistake that affects your business, you have someone to go to bat for you to get the concessions that were allotted in your contract. That means the carriers are fully accountable for the complete life cycle. As these services are becoming a reality, look for a company that rewards customer retention and creates a retained partnership that allows it to provide industry guidance for clients on the sales side that it will support through the life of the contract.
How can you implement life cycle support?
The only way to help manage the complexity and enforce accountability is to have your own internal process that keeps tabs on everything — that defines clear milestones for carriers’ turn-times and holds them accountable. There also has to be the intelligence built into it that includes follow up on trouble tickets and what to do when carriers aren’t hitting their service level commitments. An application is key because it gets people away from voice mails, e-mails, spreadsheets — things that are in their heads or on their computers — and lays it all out in a fully documented process, accessible to everyone in the organization that needs it.
If you have such a tool that centralizes your data and tracks the details of how you are holding carriers accountable, then you have whatever reports you need to understand your position and to make strategic decisions. You are able to run reports on such things as: resolution of trouble tickets, average install time, credits you received for billing issues — not to mention cost-related factors that help you optimize your spend. The key is the application. Without it, you don’t have life cycle support or management; you have reactionary business as usual — and that is costly.
Brent Saxon is vice president/general manager of Simplify Inc., a firm that helps large multi-location corporations simplify and optimize their communications life cycle management. Reach him at (281) 465-6003 or [email protected], or visit www.AreYouTelecomplex.com.