There are many reasons it makes sense to audit your telecom bill, including the fact that there may be numerous errors and the service you need has grown or changed and no longer matches what you’re paying for. Telmac’s Telecom Auditing Services help your business and your bill align with the actual reality of your situation.
Three common billing errors
These are costing telecom customers millions of dollars and include:
- Being billed for disconnected services past the stop-bill date. You may have told your provider to cancel a service, gotten a cancel-order number and a stop-billing date but that hasn’t stopped the bills which may continue until you complain.
- Incorrect rates. It shouldn’t be a surprise that billing errors are not in your favor. Your provider is carefully watching for errors that reduce their profitability, not for errors reducing your profitability. They frequently show up in two ways,
- You’re not receiving the quoted rates or the quoted discounts for newly installed services. This is normally a provider order-entry error.
- Your contract renewal for lower rates is not applied on your invoice. It may take one to two invoice cycles for your discounts to appear on your invoice after a renewal.
- Charges for services that you haven’t received or charges assessed by third party billers for services like internet security monitoring, online faxing, voicemail, etc. This is known as “cramming” which occurs when services are billed to you without your approval or knowledge. These charges could also simply be applied to the wrong company such as charges for long distance for a phone line that isn’t yours.
Managing telecom expenses is challenging.
You must re-evaluate them on a regular basis. You need to look at invoices covering RFP, lines, taxes, volume, optimization and more. We are focused on recovering payments that shouldn’t have been paid and lowering telecommunications costs while providing solutions for voice, data and wireless services.
We perform for our clients a baseline telecom audit by,
- Identifying costs, per location, per service,
- Validating that the pricing matches the contract, tariff and purchase order,
- Validating that the service is needed and in use, and
- Validating the locations being billed are still active.
Once we know what you’re being billed for and how accurate and valid those charges are, we can move on to recovering over-charges and reducing ‘no value’ and unneeded services. Telmac also develops a strategy that maps current services to current market pricing.
Telmac performs telecom price validation through an analysis of your existing invoices and your contracts, amendments, purchase orders and tariffs. When over-charges are caught we,
- Submit to the vendor formal disputes,
- Ensure that each finding receives the proper attention, and
- Ensure your account is credited the correct adjustment.
As part of our telecom audit we also find unused and unnecessary services and charges that are boosting your bills with nothing to show for it. Optimization ensures your in-production services are obtained for the lowest cost and in the most efficient manner. Telmac will present, implement and validate to you each cost reduction/optimization that has been achieved.
If you would like to learn more about Telmac’s Telecom Auditing and our offer of a free assessment of your current situation contact us today.