Telecom Strategic Sourcing and Telecommunications Procurement Services

Managing Your Telecom Costs: Telecommunications Auditing and Cost Recovery

Telecommunications is one of the most difficult spend categories to manage. Companies lose 12 – 17% of what they spend on telecommunications as a result of unorganized telecom expense management

Source: Aberdeen Group

The telecommunications industry is notoriously challenged by acquisitions, divestitures, legacy billing platforms, evolving technology, and cumbersome contracting and billing practices. These issues are detrimental to managing your telecom costs, all leading to billing errors and a loss of visibility and control. Keeping up with numerous contracts and lengthy, complex invoices can be challenging, or impossible, for many organizations. An intensive audit of a company’s prior telecom purchases and spend should be the first step in any telecom sourcing project.

Corcentric helps companies capture savings by auditing telecom spend, recovering overpayment due to carrier and provider billing errors, and implementing wireline and wireless optimization strategies. These results can then be sustained by establishing better telecom category management processes.

We are proactive and thorough when auditing your telecom spend. Corcentric begins its wireless and wireline audit by collecting the carrier invoices and contracts for the telecom services to be reviewed. If data is not available or inadequately detailed, Corcentric can work with your carriers and providers to gather the documentation needed, including customer service records.

Corcentric Telecom Bill Auditing Services give you the visibility needed to make the right telecom spend decisions, because we:

• Reconcile billing with contracts, customer services records (CSRs), and internal data
• Validate services are billing in compliance with the appropriate contract, service order, or tariff filing and verify that surcharges are appropriate and calculated correctly
• Ensure telecom services that are being billed are being utilized
• Check whether wireless and wireline services and usage align with expectations based on interviews with you, site survey results, configuration information, and internal documentation
• Reduce costs by identifying opportunities to optimize the telecom services being purchased
• Establish policies to eliminate rogue spend
• Recover overpayments due to carrier and provider billing errors
• Identify legacy technologies that can be easily replaced with better and/or less costly alternatives
• Align telecom services with users, locations, department, and account codes

As Corcentric identifies billing errors within your telecom invoices, we develop detailed tracking documents for each carrier that identify the account and service information, and a calculation of the disputed amount back to its origination or any contractual or regulatory limitation. We manage the carriers through the recovery process and negotiate when necessary to ensure credits show up correctly on your invoices. Once the billing errors have been fixed, we will audit the next month’s invoice to ensure the error remains corrected.

Some other areas where savings or recoveries can be obtained through a telecom bill audit include:

• Rogue spend of services at a site level vs. under corporate agreements
• Carrier failure to satisfy terms of agreements
• Unnecessary telecom service features
• Duplicate charges
• Excess services at a location or services billing to a closed location
• One-time and administrative charges
• Services provided at rates higher than market average