If you’re budget conscious – and which business isn’t in these tough economic times? – Here are a few things related to telephone systems maintenance that may help you make the most of your office telephony systems and how you view their maintenance:
- the amount you spend each year on your business telecoms is often referred to as the cost of ownership;
- all businesses, whether a sole trader or a large corporate, typically seek to keep that cost of ownership as low as is realistically achievable;
- some components may be fixed and largely beyond your control – that may include, for example, depreciation charges on the original purchase or some external facility rentals that include long-term contracts with providers;
- other components may be relatively predictable (within specified levels) but also more under your control to vary – examples here might include the costs of your external communications and perhaps your annual telephone systems maintenance;
- some costs may be entirely unpredictable and also, in some cases, largely indirect – so, for example, you may have systems failures that cost money to resolve and consequential losses and costs arising from the unavailability of your system;
- in terms of trying to control and reduce your cost of ownership, it is typically a good idea to seek to constrain the third category as far as is possible, before moving onto the second – in reality, you may be able to do little about the first cost category;
- if you have a professional telephone service and maintenance contract covering telephone systems support and maintenance, you may be able to move cost and risk out of the ‘unpredictable’ category into the second – this may significantly reduce your annual cost of ownership because systems problems and failures may become less frequent;
- a contract of that nature may also allow you to cap your budget for unforeseeable events – that’s because if you do need to call someone out, you will already have negotiated a contract fee (by contrast, phoning around at random, trying to find an engineer, may prove to be the least cost-effective way of doing it);
- the corollary of this is, of course, that trying to reduce your overall cost of ownership by eliminating your annual telephone systems maintenance contract, may prove to be very risky from an operational continuity point of view and for that reason, a very false economy indeed!
» Read more: Telephone Systems Maintenance – Keeping Your Costs Down