We live in a complex mobile world, and it’s getting more complex and resource intensive for IT teams to manage

When it comes to mobile services, most businesses buy airtime and devices directly from the major mobile networks. For a small number of very large customers, the mobile networks will provide a dedicated mobile account team and on-site administrators, which can help to keep mobile administration under control. However, often that’s a chargeable service and these teams are typically order focused rather than proactive in their support and management of costs and usage.

For most businesses however, managing their mobile services and devices is a significant and growing “in-house” challenge. One that continuously drains IT and Finance resources; creates ongoing budget challenges and often leads to overspending. And with “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) and its variants; GDPR compliance and the rise of mobile security risks; it’s never been more challenging to protect your business from threats to mobile data and devices.

Is your mobile network working in your best interests?

The truth is, mobile networks typically make significant “hidden” profits when customers fail to proactively manage their mobile estates. Breaching inclusive data allowances, uncontrolled roaming and paying for unused services, all lead to oversized bills and profits for the mobile networks. Proactive ongoing management by contrast, helps to materially reduce the impact of these issues; and as a result, it reduces mobile costs and removes these excess network profits. Freeing up budget that can be reinvested into new productivity enhancing technology and protecting your business against mobile security risks.

It is therefore of little surprise that the mobile networks rarely talk about, or offer their customers “managed mobile services”; it’s simply not in their interests for customers to effectively manage their mobile estates, and that’s the way they’d like to keep it. What they provide after all, is an “unmanaged” mobile service.

“A typical agreement from a mobile network provider includes ‘connecting’ you to their network, ‘billing’ you for rentals and usage, and ‘reacting’ to service calls and failures; the rest is up to ‘you’ the customer to manage.”

What’s the impact on your business of continuing to use an “unmanaged” mobile service?

If your business is like most and you’re still using an “unmanaged” mobile network service, then ask yourself whether you’re suffering from any of the following seven most common symptoms:

1. Are your mobile bills regularly or even always exceeding the projected costs that your mobile network promised when your mobile contract was last renegotiated?
2. Is your IT team spending a growing amount of their limited resources on mobile administration with little or no support from your mobile network (e.g. setting up users, preparing devices, tariff changes, managing costs, finance queries, roaming issues, network coverage)
3. Is your mobile data usage increasing at a significant rate along with your excess data costs – but your mobile network doesn’t seem that interested in doing anything about it?
4. Is your Finance team struggling to process, validate and reallocate your mobile invoices and charges to cost centres, and do they struggle to answer the challenge of “why mobile costs are out of control”?
5. Do you have a constant level of inactive connections that are generating excess monthly recurring costs, but you’re struggling to identify the users or you’re prevented from cancelling these services because of contract commitments?
6. Have you experienced one or more instances of “bill shock” in the last 12 months where individual users have generated over £1,000 of charges in a single month; but you didn’t find out until way after the event when the bill came in, and there was nothing you could do about it?
7. Are you tied in to buying overpriced mobile devices using a network “tech fund”, but you now know that this fund won’t even cover the cost of refreshing all your devices?

Perhaps it’s time to consider a “managed mobile service”?

Most businesses have resigned themselves to these issues – “it’s just how mobile networks are, isn’t it?” At Utelize, we think there’s a different way. As a “Managed Mobile Services” provider; we still use the same underlying mobile networks (e.g. Vodafone or O2), but we manage every element of the services proactively and transparently, all in your business interests.

We have direct access to the underlying mobile network, so we can access daily usage data during the month, and we have full control of all provisioning, billing and administration processes. This makes it much simpler for Utelize to streamline mobile administration and quickly identify wastage and excess usage proactively throughout the month. This allows us to take action long before these issues translate into significant over budget spending, and long before the bill is raised. Importantly, much of this work can be completed with only limited resource and input from your in-house IT team, releasing them for more strategic work.

Finally, as a managed mobile services provider, we can blend together a range of services and different networks on one flexible contract, to deliver a more tailored service, that better meets each of our customer’s requirements. Enabling us to deliver improved support to your IT team, users and business, coupled with greater contract flexibility and long-term cost savings,which we achieve through proactive management and the removal of wastage and excess charges.

With a Managed Mobile Service from Utelize, you can expect to achieve a “total cost of ownership” (TCO) saving of between 15% and 30% compared to your current total expenditure on mobile support, network, device and security.

If you think your business is suffering from one or more of the seven symptoms of using an “unmanaged” mobile service, and you’d like to learn more about Utelize’s Managed Mobile Services then please get in touch to arrange a discovery meeting and free mobile health check.

Want to learn more first, then visit our Resource Centre to download our free Best Practice Guides and white papers about implementing the Utelize Mobile Management Methodology. 

Watch our latest videos and share them with your team for a quick introduction to Utelize … 

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