How to save a bunch of dough with your cell phone carrier

Verizon, and now Sprint, are starting to offer unlimited usage plans for their cell phones and PDA devices. This in itself, can end up saving a lot of money if you have some heavy users (read the fine print though since the dollars for these plans start to go up quite a bit as you add services). But even without this, there are ways to save a lot of money on your company wireless bill that could add up to thousands of dollars a year.

For most of our clients, we recommend reviewing their cell phone bills and go over the below to determine if there is any money that can be saved by make a few changes to their policy and accounts.

• Get all of your users on a company wide plan. All to often, companies allow their employees to maintain personal plans and then expense the charges. Nowadays it is easy to move cell phone numbers between carriers so there are not big roadblocks to putting people on your plan or moving them off if ever needed.
• Get everyone on a shared pool of cell phone minutes plan. Most peoples usages varies from month to month so why not leverage the ability for carriers to handle this wile saving you money but globally reducing all of the devices in the plan to a lower monthly minute plan. In the end, everyone can still make the calls they did before, but now the pool handles the ups and downs.
• Worry about your users needs – Not very many people need text messaging for business use since corporate users have Blackberry’s and Windows Mobile devices that do email, but most people today have one device and do not want to carry around two phones. Text messaging is often the norm for communicating with friends and family so think about allowing an allotment of text messages for users rather than restricting it all together. Trust me, it is a pain to review the bill every month and then have accounting chase down the text message users. This is not a win/win situation and you will quickly realize that nearly all of your users are doing some text messaging and it will be cheaper (and a level of good will) to just make it a part of the plan.
• Choose the best carrier for your needs – All of the national carriers have their good and bad sides. Verizon seems to be tops in not dropping calls and fast data connectivity, but they are expensive compared to T-Mobile. T-Mobile seems to be the least expensive carrier, but has the slowest data network. But there is also Sprint, AT&T and others in the mix to look at. Moving to a different carrier usually means getting a new device so be prepared for the capital expenditure for that if you decide to make the move. Relating to that, if your users move from a personal plan to a business plan, often there can be termination charge for that as well. Even with these extra charges, doing the ROI for this will often still make sense so it is worth the exercise.

Now, go out and get your wireless bills and start doing the math to see how much money you can save!