A Glimpse Inside Expertel

Welcome back to our weekly blog post! In this week’s entry, we’re going to give you a little Behind-the-Scenes tour of our work process here at Expertel, and to make it just a tad bit more exciting, we’ll be using a real example. Before we go any further, we want to explain a couple of things that we believe are important for you to understand as you go into this case study. The first one concerns the privacy of our clients, which we’ve always valued deeply on a personal and professional level. Although the specific case that we’ll be going over today has already concluded, we prefer to keep the name of our client anonymous for their safety, since there will be 6 and 7-digit numbers involved. The second thing we want to make clear, is the fact that this example only covers a very small portion of all the many programs and services we provide at Expertel. If you’re interested in finding out all the ways we can help your business save money, then follow this link to our site and click the “Services” tab on the top menu bar. Alright, that’s all for the introduction, so now let’s get back into today’s topic.

The Brief

Our client came to us with a very particular problem they needed to solve. As a large and established oil and gas company in Canada, our client had lots of employees who need to be connected all the time, which meant they had a lot of different wireless phones floating around at any time. How many is “a lot” in this case? Well, they had 1500 employees at the time, each with their very own phone, which means they had 1500 phones to deal with. Now, the problem was that not all 1,500 devices were hired at the same time, and as such, not all of their phone plans were executed at the same time. This resulted in a lot of disjointed contracts that became really hard for our client to manage, which put the carrier in control instead of the business. To make things even harder, if we wanted to keep our client’s business operating, we couldn’t just cancel everything and start from scratch. Despite the huge challenge, we stepped in to change that.

First Steps

Because we couldn’t just start over with a new carrier, the only option we had was to renegotiate everything on behalf of our client. Fortunately for them, renegotiation is one of our strongest skills. Since we used to work for the carriers, we speak their language. We knew that at the end of the day, they didn’t want to lose our client’s business as much as we did, so we knew there was some leverage we could use in our client’s favor from the very start. After a solid back and forth with our client’s carrier, we were able to renegotiate their existing contracts to be coterminous, which means their old contracts were void and the new contracts now had the same start (and end) dates. This was a key achievement, because it gave our client greater negotiating power for what came later.

A New Beginning for Everyone

After our first success at the negotiating table, we decided to keep pushing forward to get an even better deal for our client. Eventually, we were able to get a new premium smartphone for everyone in the company for free, even those who weren’t technically eligible for a new phone. Now read that again. We managed to negotiate 1500 free premium phones for our client! Obviously, this made the employees really happy, but it also made business sense to us and the client. Now everyone was on the same phone with the same operating system, capabilities, security and most importantly, contract cycle. By this point, we could’ve just left it at that. After all, the job was done and our client was happy with the deal we got for them. And yet…

Above and Beyond

We were still not done. We knew that after clearing out all the mess with those mismatched contracts, there was a big chance that we could still find some savings for our clients hiding somewhere. We started combing through all the other details of their contracts to find out what features they could optimize and which ones they could remove. At the end, we ended up improving the value of the features overall in the newly constructed plans and reducing overall roaming rates. We even streamlined their fulfillment channel so new phones could be deployed faster in the future, just because we could.

The Numbers

Alright, now let’s break down some of the numbers in this story. Over the course of 3 years after implementing our changes, we managed to save this business more than $2 million by negotiating much better prices per gig of data, as well as a significant signing bonus of more than $400,000. How does that work? Let’s do the numbers.
In summary, the average wireless contract in Canada is about 3 years, and our client had 1500 cell phone lines. However, the problem was that those lines had different start and end dates. We renegotiated their existing contracts to sync with each other (in this case, to have the same start and end dates), managing to save them $340 per line, per year. We also managed more savings by lowering the cost of data from $50 for 5 gigs to $40 for 10 gigs. This adds up to a savings of $550,000 a year over 3 years, with a one-time signing bonus of $400,000 for extending their contract as well as buying back their old devices after they were done! This leads to a total savings of $2,000,000 and counting!And that was it. Our client came to Expertel with a very complex problem, we fixed it by putting our top specialists to the task, and then we went further to get an even better deal for our client, even with extra perks included. This is how we handle every order we get from our clients at Expertel. It’s safe to say that it pays to renegotiate, and with us on your side, you can get a better deal now and into the future.
So that’s it for this entry, but if you’re interested in our negotiations services or would like to find that more about the many ways Expertel can help your business save more on wireless, feel free to get in touch with us by filling out the contact form below, following this link to our contact page or using our chat to get customized attention. We hope you found some useful information in today’s post, and we’ll see you in next week’s entry!