Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Why do businesses need to benchmark communication costs?

You don’t know what you don’t know, and you cannot manage that which you don’t measure.

We are always amazed at how businesses [big business included] make decisions around vendors and solutions for their communications needs with little or no accurate fact-based information of their own. The reliance on vendors and their sales person[s] is high. And uninformed decision making can lead to poor decision making.

Time and time again businesses we are working with implement solutions based on information received from the sales person who sold the solution to them in the first place. This information is typically neither supplier agnostic nor the full picture due to lack of access to information.    

At CommsCloud we believe that managing telecoms without Business Intelligence [BI] tools is like running a large business without accountants or computers. Your procurement decisions in the communications space can end up being with your business for many years to come and we see the results thereof in our customer base every day.  

Our point of departure for any new client is to gain a detailed understanding of their communications costs before offering up any opinion. We do this by performing a detailed Audit of all their fixed and variable costs; for all their service providers.

During this process we benchmark their communications costs against;
  • Market trends in SA 
  • Industry Best Practice Standards   
The information we gather and report on in during this audit phase is used to build a documented business case which informs all the decision making for all the roles players going forward. 

And in our experience if decision makers and their project managers are well informed, return on investment and user experience with new solutions and services will be greatly enhanced.

Lastly, with accurate information [benchmarking included] your business is able to measure savings, hold service providers accountable to their SLA's and ensure a successful implementation of any solution or service.  

Peter Walsh
Cape Town
August 2011

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