Who’s hogging the data trough?
The curious characters in your company’s mobile bills
The complexity of mobile service pricing combined with the variability of individual employee and device usage patterns leads the typical enterprise to spend 30% more than necessary on their mobile services. It’s difficult for a company to find the many types of avoidable expense lurking within the hundreds of thousands of items on their monthly mobile bills. Having used Corrata’s advanced billing analytics solution to examine over a million enterprise mobile bills in the last twelve months we’ve discovered a curious cast of characters prowling in your bills. First up – the Data Hog.
Part 1 – The Data Hog
If your company has an enterprise mobile phone plan, it’s very likely that your plan includes a data allowance that is shared across your organization. This system makes lots of sense – light and heavy data users are balanced out. Normal mobile use – checking email and social media, capturing data and viewing websites – typically generates between 500MB and 2GB of data use per month. A pooled data plan that covers such use benefits employees and is generally easy to administer. As these are valued employees doing critical work on behalf of your firm, it’s important for them to have a hassle free access to the mobile applications they need without the need to count bytes. The challenge is to ensure that the lack of restrictions on individual usage doesn’t lead to a rapid escalation in overall data hogging on unrelated business needs.
Streaming Junkies
If someone on your team is using large amounts of mobile data to improve their productivity, the correct response is to applaud their initiative and encourage their co-workers to emulate their behavior. But what if it turns out that you have “data hogs”: employees using their devices for bandwidth hungry non-business applications? They’re draining the data pool and putting you in the position of having to upgrade your plan just so these few “streaming junkies” can watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones or reruns of Downton Abbey while on the road! Well then… it’s time for you to take back control!
Big Brother
And no, that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly playing the part of Big Brother, watching every megabyte each staff member uses throughout each day across the globe – that’s just not feasible. What it does mean is that you should monitor individual use and company billing to gain insight into potential issues and abuse, allowing you to adjust individual plans as needed to keep everyone happy.
Even if your data hogs have just not properly configured the settings on their mobile devices (mobile syncing, app updates, etc. all suck up data even if the device is not in active use), you still need to stay on top of this or else be stuck with the need to spend more on data.
For many enterprises, the rapid increase in mobile data consumption by their employees cannot be explained by business need. These increases often coincide with a move to pooled data plans. For these businesses now is the time to exert control and encourage employees to use company paid for mobile data responsibly.
