6 Moves to Overcome Telecom Management Pressures
It’s easy to say that being a modern-day telecommunications leader looks vastly different than it did just five years ago. Widely due to disruptive events including the pandemic and software developer shortage, you’ve had to become accustomed to wearing a variety of hats the role previously didn’t require.
Today, managing your telecommunications tech stack is so much more than managing your PBX, especially if you're operating in the cloud. Managing a successful IT team requires hard technical skills in addition to soft people skills.
For many IT leaders, demonstrating all the necessary skills to succeed is becoming extremely challenging. And if you’re feeling buried under the pressure recent disruptions have put on your job description, you’re not alone. In fact, 62% of tech leaders feel physically and emotionally drained in their current roles.
There’s no denying that telecom management is a lot to handle. To help, we’re covering what a successful telecommunications strategy looks like and how to successfully implement it.
What Does Effective Telecom Management Look Like?
Successful telecommunications management ensures effective communications take place across your organization. And as noted above, there’s massive responsibility involved in overseeing your telecommunications tech stack.
To ensure your tools are worth the investment, each stage of the asset lifecycle must be carefully observed for governance, control and efficiency to ensure operations are running smoothly.
Of course, this process is easier said than done. So whether you’re not sure where to begin or you simply haven’t had enough time to refine your strategy, here are our top tips for building a successful communications strategy:
1. Keep orderly track of your telecom inventory
New carriers, telecom equipment, softphones, software tools, phone number inventory management… your telecommunications tech stack is always growing and as such, it can be easy to lose track of all the tools your organization is investing in. This can quickly lead to unused equipment and ultimately, wasted money.
Of course, this would be unacceptable as among your many hats, lowering technology costs while boosting efficiency is at the top of your priority list. So, successfully overseeing and managing all of the assets within your network is critical.
This is where having a software asset management (SAM) process is beneficial for telecom leaders. It can help you:
- Renew or eliminate licenses based on organizational usage
- Examine asset effectiveness, manage service and identify troubleshooting
- Distribute licenses to broader teams and help with training
- Obtain asset quotes from software vendors
- Initiative software trials and sign contracts
2. Ensure optimum efficiencies
In addition to knowing what’s within your network, building a strategy that incorporates workflow automation and process optimization is vital to achieving departmental and business goals.
Your telecommunications tools should come stacked with quality assurance and reporting features to ensure customer satisfaction and performance KPIs are met. These tools include:
- Call monitoring: The use of call monitoring creates opportunities for a growing business to use quality monitoring tools such as live coaching and call scoring in support of department or company KPIs.
- Real-time analytics: Real-time analytics help your call center managers track metrics like total calls, average talk time and call outcomes by team or agent.
- Service level metrics: Allow your managers to not only track what agents are doing, but how they are performing. This allows them to offer continuous training where needed and ensure your business is exceeding customer expectations.
3. Look for ways to reduce billing redundancies
As a telecom leader, it’s important to maintain your budget and look for ways to cut telecom expenses most effectively without hindering sales and support initiatives. Low-hanging fruit is reducing your telecom bill where possible. Here are some areas you could look at to help:
- Get rid of unused tools: Take a look at your monthly bill to ensure you're not paying for tools your team doesn't need or use.
- Research carriers: Finding a new carrier that offers free number porting and lower rates is also a great way to reduce your telecom expenses.
- Look into BYOC options: Bring Your Own Carrier (BYOC) allows you to upgrade your PBX or existing digital infrastructure without having to break up with your long-standing carrier. This allows you to reap the benefits of better call reliability and lower overhead costs.
- Modernize your communications systems: Moving your telecommunications system to the cloud is a great way to slash telecom expenses. For one, it removes the need to host costly communications server equipment on-site– which translates to cost savings in other areas including:
- Subscription or usage-based telecom bills that are cheaper than maintaining your own PBX
- Call rates and phone numbers that reduce TCO
- Reduced maintenance costs for an on-premise system
- Less money spent on trunk lines
- Features like softphones, call forwarding and MS Teams direct routing
4. Maintain relationships with vendors
Managing your vendor list and having proactive conversations about maintaining your communications network integrity is a critical part of successful telecom management. A few things to discuss with your vendors on an ongoing basis include:
- Confirm updates on compliance: With telecom breaches at an all-time high, it’s never been more important to protect your communications and customers from phone fraud.
- Review their security measures: From clustered firewalls to credit limits, there are a variety of security measures that your telecom providers need to have in place. Our security measures checklist will help you better evaluate telecom vendor security measures such as:
- Evaluate call quality: Your customers expect a smooth, reliable connection when they call or chat with your organization. Your telecom vendors should actively advise you on how to troubleshoot your system and resolve call quality issues. Additionally, keeping track of your KPIs and keeping up with call quality best practices will help you have insight into any issues taking place.
- Evaluate their new features: As the world changes, so will your telecom tech stack. New and innovative tools like unified communications, IoT, blockchain and AI require IT professionals to keep their skills sharp and up-to-date. With that being said, it’s critical to work with providers who are advancing with the future needs of your customers. Check in regularly with your vendors to ensure they are meeting the current and future needs of your customers.
5. Perform routine security sweeps
As mentioned above, it’s important to audit your vendors to ensure security measures are being met. With that being said, a successful telecom management strategy will also weave in your own routine security and anti-fraud protection protocols. This strategy should include fraud prevention best practices including:
- The review of call record details
- A process to secure business credentials
- A company-wide protocol to secure passwords
- Restricted call forwarding options
- Security protocols including software/hardware security needs, ongoing employee education and established roles for the IT team
6. Expand the team using non-IT members
The truth is, neither you nor your development team has the time to do all the extra job requirements recent socio-economic disruptions like COVID-19 and The Great Resignation have thrown your way.
That’s why successful telecom management strategies focus on expanding less technical IT duties to non-technical employees through low-code no-code telecommunication apps. These tools provide numerous benefits for IT leaders and their teams, including:
- Offload less technical work to citizen developers
- Ramp-up deployment time
- Maintain total governance
- Reduce business costs
- Promote cross-department collaboration
It’s said that these tools are changing the future of telecommunications forever. Read all about how LCNC applications are transforming the future of IT in the ebook, Coding Beyond Tradition.
Empower Your Telecom Management Strategy by Finding the Right Provider
As a telecom leader, you have an ever-growing amount of weight on your shoulders. We hope that these tips will help provide a framework that guides you to build a successful telecom management strategy with ease.
Communications are a necessary expense, but it doesn’t have to be a painful process. With AVOXI, you can modernize your communications and continue to grow your business while taking advantage of feature-rich voice, messaging and contact center solutions that help your telecommunications strategy run strong while staying within your budget and serving your customers with top call quality. See what you can do with the AVOXI platform.
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