Controlling the Wireless Bite

Minutes Matter

Perhaps the single biggest consideration in a wireless plan is how many minutes to prepay for. Although the tendency may be to start out with as small a package as possible, Larkin advises businesses to do exactly the opposite.

“Start big,” he says. “Too often, people start too low and then they get overages. That’s the most expensive part of wireless. If you go over your minutes, you may pay 40 cents a minute, as opposed to 4 cents a minute. That adds up fast.” Haigh agrees: “I think it’s much better to oversubscribe than to undersubscribe.”

Victor Mack, Verizon Wireless’s director of business sales for the Great Plains region, says his sales representatives work closely with clients to determine exactly what plan best fits their needs. “Minutes are absolutely essential to the overall experience of our clients,” Mack says. “Our assessment is used to match them to an appropriate rate plan. We know our clients would have a bad experience if their actual usage exceeded the plan.”

One of the benefits of a corporate program is the option to pool minutes. Instead of having a limit for each individual user, the company as a whole can subscribe to a bulk sum—say, 50,000 minutes. “It doesn’t matter which phones eat up the minutes,” Haigh says. “Some will use more, some will use less.”

Whether the employee uses those minutes for business or personal calls will always be an issue. Because some plans include unlimited nights and weekends or large allotments of time, some companies don’t worry about personal calls. In those cases, Singh says, it can be unnecessarily costly and time consuming to track employee calls. But if usage routinely exceeds the allotted minutes, it is important to find out why.

Larkin says that although some companies have policies about cell phone usage, more are related to safety issues—such as using wireless while driving—than personal use. It’s easier, he says, to plan for the personal calls. “Be smart on the front end,” Larkin says. “Many plans include free long distance and unlimited nights and weekends. So you can restrict usage during business hours, but not worry about it afterwards.”