Managing a business’s mobile device fleet can be complex, particularly in larger deployments. Because of that complexity, many in-house managers try and simplify the workload by taking shortcuts in an attempt to simplify their management tasks. One way in which we commonly see this taking place is the attempt to shoehorn all of a company’s mobile devices onto one mobile plan: Managers will either purchase unlimited accounts for all users, or else put all of their mobile devices onto the cheapest plans that they can find.
Wireless Carriers: Good at Connectivity, Bad at Consulting
The way in which busy managers or executives often go about implementing this strategy is by contacting the wireless carrier directly, but therein lies the rub: Carriers make money from selling connectivity, and have neither the time nor the desire nor the resources to work with a company on customizing per-device plans for their business customers. They will take a one-size-fits-all approach, because their goal is simply to get you connected as quickly as possible.
Easy Doesn’t Equal Cheap Mobility
That said, blanketing your entire mobile device fleet with one unlimited plan works, in terms of guaranteeing that all mobile workers will always have all of the connectivity and data that they need -- but where it falls far short of optimal, of course, is that this strategy can be extremely expensive for larger-scale deployments -- and because many mobile workers will not actually need that level of service, a large part of that expense is unnecessary.
Buying the cheapest plan for all devices likewise comes with costs that don’t necessarily show up front. While the cheapest plan may be adequate for many mobile workers, many other workers will have usage requirements far in excess of the plan limits, leaving two equally bad scenarios. For carriers that don’t have “free” overage, the company ends up footing the bill for expensive overage charges. Carriers that don’t nominally charge for overages, on the other hand, will typically throttle connectivity down to 2G-like speeds when an overage occurs -- and since this impacts the users who most need the data, handicapping the users can create expensive inefficiencies that won’t show on the monthly phone bill.
When Easy Does Equal Cheap Mobility
Both of those extremes are costly -- and both are unnecessary if your company has a proper managed mobility services plan. Our philosophy at Wireless Watchdogs is to make sure that every mobile device is on the plan that best matches its usage. In order to accomplish that, we -- like many managers -- start every mobile device on the cheapest plan available. But we’ve also built a system that analyzes the actual usage of all of a customer’s mobile devices, including both plan under-utilization and plan over-utilization. That allows us to make sure that every mobile device is on the cheapest plan available for how it’s being used, which in turn creates cost savings for our customers: Unnecessary high-usage plans are eliminated, while at the same time those mobile workers who do need those plans are always able to work efficiently.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding: We typically save our customers $15 to $20 per month, per device on their wireless bills -- and regardless of the size of your mobile device fleet, those kinds of numbers quickly add up. And there’s another benefit here that won’t show in your mobile bill, but will show in productivity -- and that’s the extent to which our customers are free to focus more on their core business simply because the burdens of managing mobility are lifted from them.
Finding the Way to Reduced Mobility Costs
In fact, we’re so certain of the strength of our services and our platform that we offer a free audit of the past three months of your company’s wireless bills. You provide us the bills, and we’ll do all the work and then sit down with you and show you how much you could be saving every month. There’s no obligation here, just information -- so you owe it to your company to request the free audit and find out for yourself why, when it comes to mobile plans, one size truly does not fit all.
