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R3bn in needless cellphone spend in SA

Tariffic estimates that companies are unnecessarily wasting more than R3 billion a year because of the lack of effective tools to manage their cellphone spend.

Tariffic, the company which specialises in saving corporates money on their cellphone bills, aims to cut this excessive overspending through the launch of Tariffic Online, its complete Cellular Management Platform – a 360-degree real-time management dashboard for all your corporate cellphone spend.

“More and more, companies have told us that it’s impossible for them to manage their company spend, their abuse, and their upgrades”, says Tariffic’s CEO Antony Seeff. “The self-service platform allows companies to easily understand their cellphone costs, manage their cellular environment, curb abuse in real-time, and save on their cellphone bills both in-contract and when contracts expire”. Tariffic Online operates across all networks in one easy-to-use environment and provides you with management data in real-time allowing companies to actively curb their cellphone spend.

Vodacom owns the corporate market

“Over the past few years working in the cellular industry we have seen some very interesting trends”, says Cherise Stein, who heads up Business Development for Tariffic, “although Vodacom’s packages are approximately 21% more expensive than the other mobile network operators, Vodacom continues to own the lion’s share of the corporate cellphone market in South Africa”. More than 80% of all corporate contracts analysed by Tariffic over the years, belong to the Vodacom network.

Each contract wastes approximately R280 per month

“When looking at the tens of thousands of contracts analysed by Tariffic” says Nicholas Botes,

Tariffic’s CTO, “we have found that we can save on average about R280 per contract per month just by ensuring that each employee is on the correct package. For a company with 500 contracts that’s on average a saving of R1.68m that goes directly to the company’s bottom line”.  Botes notes that savings are achieved even in contract, “what people don’t realise is that Out-of-Bundle data is over 6 times more expensive than in-bundle data, and Tariffic Online sees company employees saving an average of R226 per month by simply adding the correct bundles.”

11% of contracts land up in a desk drawer

Further analyses by Tariffic indicates that 11% of corporate lines analysed have no usage on them whatsoever. Antony Seeff explains “our Tariffic Online system identifies this – usually when an employee leaves a company or moves roles, the SIM cards then land up gathering dust in a desk drawer somewhere while the company is still charged every month”.

Your extra spend is ordained in the stars

“Our Tariffic Online system finds “Extra Costs”, which are a killer financially”, says Toma Batev, Tariffic’s Head of DevOps, “the average SIM has R55 per month in extra costs, which are generally completely unnecessary. It is absurd that companies are paying for employees’ daily horoscope SMSs and for BlackBerry charges when the employees are not using Blackberry phones – and many haven’t been for years!”

Are your employees taking you for a ride?

Employees try get away with whatever they can when they think their bosses aren’t watching.  Tariffic Online also identifies voice and data abuse and notifies the company and employees in real-time, based on predefined notification alerts.  Tariffic has helped identify a case of an employee using in excess of 70GB of data on their cellphone in a single month. “We also look at frequently-dialled numbers and after-hours calling to pick up real-time abuse”, explains Seeff. We have even found some employees doing airtime transfer off their SIM cards to other people of more than R25 000 per month.

“There is too much smoke and mirrors in this industry” says Seeff, “by removing the mystery and providing the right tools, we can regain the margin and give it back to the consumers”.

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