“New pricing options can remove the fear of uncontrollable spend.” – Mark Allinson, head of Commercial, Vodafone Global Enterprise
In recent years, rapid advances in technology have greatly enhanced the ability of business and domestic users to share voice and data communications. As Mark Allinson, head of Commercial, Vodafone Global Enterprise writes, in a short time the introduction of the iPhone and other sophisticated handheld devices have driven a major shift in user patterns beyond the laptop, with the new handsets driving explosive growth in data usage.
The extended choice this offers undoubtedly delivers major benefits in terms of greater communications flexibility. However, this increased mobility comes at a price, both literally and metaphorically. In deciding whether or not to make such devices available to their staff, firms are understandably concerned about the risk of soaring and uncontrolled communications costs, especially in the area of data roaming charges as employees use their devices across multiple geographies and networks.
However, pricing options are now available which can remove the fear of uncontrollable spend, by providing the predictability of a fixed price solution tailored to the business’s data roaming needs.
Enterprise bundles
Best practice options take a phased approach, by initially offering a range of daily and monthly pricing bundles as both the provider and customer learn about the roaming patterns of individual users across the enterprise. Based on this information, a tailored company-wide pricing package can be developed which includes a pricing guarantee, providing certainty of costs in an area of expenditure that can easily get out of control.
So how does this work in practice? To cut the number of different mobile contracts it had to manage, international home appliance manufacturer, Whirlpoolappointed Vodafone Global Enterpriseto manage its mobile communications across Europe.
Visible costs
A single Master Services Agreement (MSA), initially covering 15 countries, has delivered a consistent level of service, improved visibility of costs and achieved savings through reduced roaming and international charges. Staff now have access to the best devices to suit their needs and the success of this ‘one supplier’ approach has already led Whirlpool to investigate further mobility benefits, such as salesforce automation.
“We chose Vodafone Global Enterprise because it was able to provide a cost-efficient European solution of the required scale, and we see them as excellent partners for potential future global co-operation,” says Roberto Carvetti, Director, Indirect Procurement and Capital Acquisition, Whirlpool Europe.
Similarly, the world’s largest enterprise software company, Oracle has appointed Vodafone Global Enterprise to supply mobile services management, and mobile and data services to more than 16,000 employees across EMEA on a fixed fee, per user basis. The services are delivered through the fully-hosted Vodafone Telecoms Management service.
The agreement encourages worry-free mobile voice and data usage among employees to boost productivity, at the same time ensuring that managers can accurately predict expenditure. “As well as greater convenience and cost efficiencies, we expect that this partnership will deliver enhanced services to our employees,” confirms Carol Kelly, Vice President, Global Revenue and Procurement Operations, Oracle.
As the above examples show, the benefits of transparency and cost control are likely to be best achieved by working with a communications provider – one that can offer a global network footprint and has established experience of developing flexible pricing bundles to meet a range of different user needs. It is only by matching the flexibility of product with an equivalent flexibility of pricing that multinational corporates will be able to take full advantage of today’s exciting new communications technologies.
