Little is more mission-critical for communication and collaboration than audio conferencing, but the telecom industry’s way of doing business is abysmal.
Notoriously, their strategy is to pitch you commodity pricing for a basic service only to stick it to you on the back end. They do this in the hope that you don’t have the knowledge or stamina to negotiate through a pile of hidden fees buried in a convoluted contract.
It gets worse. They know that the typical employee has little or no awareness of the cost associated with their use of audio conferencing in your organisation, a fact that they fully exploit.
Here’s what you experience: unpredictable costs that penalise you for communicating and collaborating more. Then you have the privilege of trying to make sense of the surprises on an invoice to figure out where your money is actually going. In our investigation we even found multiple law firms that do nothing but help organisations with litigation to clean up the mess.
It’s simply not the honourable way to do business.
The use of technology in an organisation is not only about hard expenses (visible or hidden), but also a “death by a thousand cuts” associated with poor usability every time someone touches the phone. And user experience (“UX”) increasingly is recognised as having an impact on financial performance.
Your opportunity, we trust, is self-evident:
Assuming your current telecommunications vendor isn’t going to encourage this conversation, the next step is to create your own analysis that better maps to reality.
Analysis of the TCO of audio conferencing for your organisation should take into account three areas of impact:
Taking control of understanding the way your current vendor is impacting your bank account need not be hard. Our recommendation: take the total expense of your last three months’ invoices and divide by the total number of conference call minutes used.
Total Invoice ÷ Total Audio Conferencing Minutes Used = Actual Cost Per Minute
Regardless of what the sales rep quoted you, this is your actual cost per minute.
Management and support soft costs do not occur with the same frequency as end-users, but they are operation overhead nonetheless. Examples include:
Usability (or “user experience”) is the study of behaviour — behaviour that is a large expense for most organisations. Unfortunately, telecom vendors’ offers are based on century-old technology that imposes a hidden tax every time users have to use their systems. Examples include:
Telecom vendors bet that you will live with it because “that’s the way it is”. But that is not the way it has to be.
Plug in your numbers and see for yourself how much you actually spend on audio conferencing (both hard and soft costs) with this handy excel calculator.
About EventBuilder and Roger Courville, CSP
Roger Courville is a 17-year veteran of the conferencing industry, analyst, author, and Chief Content Officer at EventBuilder. He helps organisations analyse, design and deliver interactive audio/web/video conferencing solutions for real-time remote communication. The collective team experience includes hundreds of clients, tens of thousands of webinars, and more than three million attendees. They can be found at www.EventBuilder.rocks.
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