By Dan Baldwin, Editor
951-251-5155 email
Finally. One of the biggest phone companies on the planet did something that will make the life of a Southern California business owner a little easier -- or did they?
Click here to read the Verizon Wireless press release that states that they are eliminating all their different "buckets of minutes" rate plans in favor of just letting all their customers talk and text all they like for one flat monthly price.
"All you can eat" talk and text. That's gotta be a good thing, right?
If all your employees do is talk and text a lot this new plan certainly is good. Except your employees don't just "talk and text". What they seem to be doing mostly these days is "apping" it up with every data drinking phone app they can figure our how to download onto their phones.
"Cha Ching" (That's the sound of you paying for your employees' mobile data usage through Verizon's new "shared data" pricing -- which is the other half of their new pricing package.)
Will Your Business Wireless Phone Bill Go Up or Down? Yes...
In effect, Verizon simply held up a mirror to its old pricing package and said, "This is the new package". Where they used to have unlimited data and metered voice and text, now they have metered data and unlimited voice and text.
To learn how this will affect business wireless phone bills I called two people I know that run business wireless expense monitoring and management companies, Moe Arnaiz from eMobus out of San Diego and Josh Lipton from Advantix out of Texas.
When I asked Moe, how Verizon's new pricing will affect small or enterprise businesses he responded, “TBD, this model hasn’t fully hit the enterprise mainstream yet, today Verizon is launching this with consumers sharing data in pods of up to 10 users. However I will tell you my sources tell me it’s headed for enterprise and like any variable wireless billing technique it will need to be managed closely to minimize exorbitant costs and maximize savings. Much like the traditional voice cost issues we’ve all grown so accustomed to.”
When I asked Josh about how this pricing change will affect the marketplace overall he responded, "Mobile operators are victims of their own success insomuch as the smartphone revolution is pushing the capacity of their networks at an ever increasing rate. If you haven’t already, invest the time to analyze your mobile plans or find a 3rd party to provide you with unbiased findings. By taking advantage of new, old and even negotiated plans you can gain control over your mobile spend. Whatever you do, don’t wait for the carriers to make the choices for you."
Time to Bring in More Labor, More Software -- or Both
The bottom line for business owners is this -- every employee that has a smartphone in one hand has their other hand on your wallet. The critical monthly measures that lead to a normal cell phone bill or a $16,098 cell phone bill are not being measured or monitored by most business owners, CIOs or IT directors.
What to do? Start monitoring and measuring -- on a daily basis. It only took six days to rack up this $16,098 cell phone bill. How do you monitor and what do you measure? Start by reviewing the four action items noted at the bottom of this post.
The immediate answer to the problem is to throw labor at it. Have someone in your business monitor your mobile data account on a daily basis. After you get a handle on who's using what mobile data and why then you'll want to spread around some software -- data monitoring apps on your employee's phones and account monitoring apps for your various wireless phone bills.
Or You Can Just Call Us!
As you know, we solve phone and office technology problems for a living. If your business has under 100 mobile devices then we can set up a monthly review and recommendation solution to have one of our mobile phone bill experts review and report on your phone service once a month.
If your business has over 100 mobile devices we can introduce you to a couple vendors we trust that specialize in monitoring mobile device usage spread over several mobile phone companies.
I specialize in helping Southern California business customers in San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ontario and beyond. If we set you up for our free 45-minute consulting call (click here for details) we might be able to solve your problem for free!
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