Multiple supplier contract

Telecommunications is a vital part of every business - the telephone continues to be one of the most important methods for business organisations to communicate with their customers and suppliers.

A reliable, cost effective and flexible service is a key component of most business strategies, but it can often be difficult to make the best choice. There are a vast range of ever changing rates and services available; capped call prices, bundled services and long term contracts, for example.

The positive and negative points of each option have to be considered;

Capped call prices and bundled services may look attractive, but they can often be misleading. The industry average length for a business call is around 1.5 minutes. Such a call would typically cost less than 2 pence with ITC. BT have a contract option where calls are capped at 10p, however the minimum call charge with BT is 6 pence, so even the shortest call would be 6p. Price capping would have little or no impact on a typical business call pattern. For a local or national call to cost 10p with ITC, the call duration would be almost 8 minutes.

Commitment to a long term contract can be costly over time. It is common practise in the UK to be asked to sign up for a minimum 1 year term for services. Organisations often use just one network provider for example to benefit from a one bill service and have just one company to contact for faults, billing or customer service. Attractive sign up rates mean that the contract is often beneficial to start with, but they can prove inflexible and prohibitively expensive to change should you need to do so.

It is interesting to compare the UK market with the alternative approach of organisations in North America. In the majority of cases in the US, the IT team will take outbound call services from 2 or 3 different networks on concurrent, open ended contracts. This enables them to; benefit from the best available call rates, offers an easy option to change to one of their alternative providers if service levels, customer service or costs are not satisfactory and provides disaster recovery in the event of network failure of one of their providers. In summary, the benefits of this approach are;

• No long term contract commitment
• Benefit from the best current call rates
• It is easy to change service provider
• Resilience - A key component of a disaster recovery strategy.

There are however, several negative aspects to this approach:

• Multiple Bills

Billing can be a burden, receiving several bills from different suppliers increases administration time.

• Time

It is also time consuming and laborious to assess each companies call rates on a regular basis.

• Several Contacts

Using several companies inevitably means having numerous contacts for your services.

• No Accountability

In the event of a problem, there is often no accountability.

You can now have the benefits of this approach but without the drawbacks.

Please contact our sales team for further details of our tailored packages on 0330 333 02 01.

If you would like one of our telecommunications consultants to contact you for further advice, please email contact@it-cts.com with your details.