Communication Lifecycle Management

By Tanya Seda

If you are in IT, Sourcing, or Finance or your work involves bill payment systems in any way, you likely could benefit from a Communication Lifecycles Management solution. If you’ve never heard of Communications Lifecycle Management, you may be curious to know what it’s all about, and whether it can help streamline your business’ billing systems, and save time and money.

So, to begin: what is Communication Lifecycle Management? A CLM platform is a management system that can help reduce costs and optimize services your business already has. This helps save time and money for all communications, both domestic and global. A CLM platform can facilitate a more seamless management process to ensure that your communications assets and expenses are covered across their full lifecycle.

A Communication Lifecycle Management platform and its functionalities can be broken down into a few functional components:

• Bill Payment and Expense Management: Provides a technologically advanced bill payment system that stores your financial data, including expenses and invoices, in a centralized repository. This ensures accurate identification of business records and allocation of services rendered using previously stored information. It also gives you the ability to pinpoint any suspicious or unusual billing anomalies within the environment.
• Reporting Capabilities and Operational Mechanism: This is the main software system that manages and oversees the full bill payment lifecycle. Certain executable areas that fall under communication preferences, usage and optimization, or extra costs pertaining to disaster recovery often have additional add-on options, depending on the needs of your business.
• Monthly Reporting: Your overall cost is dependent on the type of service needed for your particular environment, usage analytics, and overall consumption. Monthly evaluations are done to ensure accurate plan management, keeping your expenses to a minimum, and to best assess whether you need to scale up or down in terms of your business environment size and needs.
• Asset Subscriptions: Wireless or fixed-landline environments can affect your communication lifestyle management needs. This tenant is used to most accurately appropriate asset funding and your business’ cost-to-need ratios. This can incorporate all types of information, such as your Internet and wireless speed, or what type of phone service you use if it happens to be a fixed-landline. The last thing a good CLM provider wants is for you to be over-subscribing to services that you can’t don’t need, or that cost your company even more.
• Cost Recovery: Communication Lifecycle Management platforms, if operating properly, will be able to accurately disseminate and analyze your company’s invoicing and billing system. This is essentially a Best Practice safety measure, keeping you one step ahead of any data loss, financial mistakes, underutilization of services, or discrepancies in your billing lifecycle. Allocation of costs to correct General Ledger and Department coding is also paramount to a sound IT budget. Any cost recovery efforts rendered should be worthwhile, and should save you money in the long run.

Some of the things a CLM service provider can assist with are identifying financial errors, incorrect use of funds, unwarranted charges, and so on. If you experience a situation like this, you can utilize your CLM vendor to assist them. This should cover any financial conundrums, which your service provider will address on your and/or your customers’ behalf. This might involve negotiating with the business that facilitated the charge, examining all negotiated contracts, evaluating any install or disconnect dates of service, and more. Because a CLM vendor manages all aforementioned components within their platform offering, this information as well as all of your data will be readily available to you at any time of your service management. If you choose to make the judgment call yourself and have been given all the data needed, you can make an educated assessment on whether there are discrepancies, prompting your provider to address concerns on your behalf with little to no involvement at all. This is the key component of a CLM service; one that supports your business to outsource both helpdesk and project management functions.

A CLM service functions as what are often expensive technological responsibilities that fall on higher-level IT engineers, which can lead to many extra fees and service charges. In addition, CLM providers have the continued ability to document and track any and all changes to track and identify chronic issues or underperforming providers. A CLM offering is a helpful option, ensuring better strategic planning across your organization as a whole.

A CLM’s sourcing and procurement functionalities are multi-layered at their core. Their ability to identify the correct service providers and products makes them do a lot of the guesswork for you. Their offerings are often best suited to optimizing your current or desired services through curated product selection, as well as bringing alternative service providers to the table when necessary. This can also include contract management, which covers the task of ensuring contracts are being negotiated well in advance of their expiration. This is a trap we too often see businesses fall into. Our goal at Network Control is to ensure that those contracts are in alignment with your overall business strategy. Your overall business performance and future cost control will be fundamentally better when utilizing a Communication Lifecycle Management system.

In our experience, service providers that have historically ruled over the CLM space have continued to push customers away from their TDM network or their traditional service delivery network. Additionally, they try to undercut or migrate their loyal, paying customers to their IP platforms by defaulting them to lesser services for greater fees, something we have seen far too many times. We don’t want our customers to fall into overpaying for faulty services or experiencing extensive financial loss like this because there isn’t enough information available to them, resulting in billing increases steadily rising month to month, year after year. Being proactive, exploring your best options, and staying ahead of those contract end-dates by choosing a reliable CLM provider will ensure that you are allowing enough lifecycle time to consider all the variables involved in your business. The advantages of a Communication Lifecycle Management can truly revolutionize the way your billing system works and is your best bet to have a seamless system that does not cost you financially or give you extra stress.

If you have more questions about Communication Lifecycle Management systems, feel free to reach out today.