Apocalypse Now! Telecom Style

A War Story from the Telecom Front

We now take a break from our regularly scheduled programming, mining the gory details of mobile telecom challenges to bring you war stories from the telecom front. This one is from back in the days before there were 82 Star Trek spinoffs and 107 different Star Wars movies, series, and matching pajamas.

Now. Dear reader, please visualize yourself in a proverbial telecom chopper with the sounds of the whirring blades overhead. Music is blaring full volume from speakers installed on said chopper. Ride of the Valkyries, of course. If you have not seen Apocalypse Now, you have permission to stop reading right now and take several hours to watch it. But I digress.

We are heading off to war with the BATCo hordes, and we are outnumbered. And, yes, BATCo does stand for Big-Ass Telecom Company, thank you for asking. Now, I love the smell of napalm in the morning as much as the next person. So the team and I are locked and loaded in the chopper, ready to engage the enemy.

Maybe I am the mad Colonel Kurtz in this story. Although if you ask my business colleagues, they will tell you that before I have my coffee, Colonel Kurtz is a puppy compared to me.

Mission Background

In those days, possibly when wooly mammoths roamed, our customer purchased more than $100 million per year in telecom services from more than 30 different providers, at both retail and wholesale rates. However error-prone retail telecom billing was at the time, the wholesale side was significantly more problematic. It was replete with back-billed items from years ago that would mysteriously appear without explanation, filled with unexplained installation charges, and much more.

The Minor Skirmishes

I am not entirely certain I can do justice to the complexity and pain involved in understanding and decoding the billing we analyzed.

Picture a banker’s box full of dense, detailed information. Now understand this: that banker’s box contained only the contracts, which varied for each state, identifying what rates and rate elements were supposed to be charged. The ten banker’s boxes that arrived each month contained the actual paper invoices. Or you could do what we did and decode flat files from a 1950s-style billing system that predated the words “relational database.”

Our team found error after error after error. I rolled my eyes so expertly it was almost as though I had had three daughters go through middle school to train me. But I digress.

We filed hundreds of claims, all of which were routinely denied. We escalated. Then we escalated again. Eventually we reached a level at BATCo where someone realized there were more than $5 million in billing claims sitting in their systems, and that routine denials were not going to work.

The Big Battle That Never Happened

We had a meeting with BATCo set up. Our ammo was stocked, the troops were trained, our customer had been briefed. And then I got a call from our customer’s lead attorney, J., who asked for a meeting of our own.

J. told me that he and his team would be handling the negotiations with BATCo from here on out. That was within their rights, despite the amount of money I had already spent on camo gear and face paint for the team. Bah humbug. No fight for us.

A few months later, right around Christmas (this will be important later), J. called to tell me he had settled with BATCo. They had executed a settlement agreement that honored all of our claims, and we would be compensated based on it. Merry Christmas to us!

I may have bought the entire team camo t-shirts that read “I was at the Battle of BATCo and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Or maybe not.

The Mad Colonel Really Loses His Marbles

As New Year’s approached, I logged back into the working world to face the mass of emails that had accumulated. J. had sent me the executed agreement, which I decided to read. And that is when I lost my marbles.

Long-time friends, colleagues, and of course family members may dispute that I had marbles to begin with, much less that this was when I lost them. Again, I digress.

Buried in the agreement was this: “For a period of two (2) years from the effective date of this settlement agreement, Anilix is prohibited from filing any and all billing claims with [BATCo] on behalf of [customer].”

I called J. “What the heck,” I said. Maybe I used the word “heck.” Maybe not.

He explained it to me. BATCo had wanted to ban us from filing billing claims forever. J. got them to agree to a two-year period. And coincidentally, the statute of limitations for filing billing claims under our BATCo contract was, you guessed it, two years. So, for the next two years, we would file claims as usual with our other providers and simply aggregate the BATCo billing claims, filing them in bulk in two years and a day.

J. was an evil genius. Actually, he is one of the nicest and smartest people I know. He understood something BATCo did not: sometimes you do not storm the village. You go quietly upriver, you wait, and you arrive exactly when you are supposed to. He had outsmarted BATCo and their own attorneys. Brilliant.

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas

Hi, my name is Rick, and I find it pleasing, possibly enjoyable, maybe even exhilarating to exhibit certain Grinch-like characteristics. While my skin tone is more olive than green, my daughters may have noted that I can be stubborn, sarcastic, and even evilly inappropriate at times.

Of course, the daughters also point out that whenever they exhibit any of those same traits, it is the result of their compromised genetics. But I digress.

So. Two years after the effective date of the settlement agreement, we filed $2 million in claims with BATCo. The filing may have gone in on December 22 or December 23. I forget.

I do remember my cell phone lighting up, as expected, within a few hours. It was a senior finance executive from BATCo. “What the heck,” she asked me. Maybe she used the word “heck.” Maybe she did not.

Well, I explained it to her. She and her team had tried to ruin our Christmas two years ago. All is fair in love and war, and this was not love.

Incompetent or Evil?

This is the part of the post where I usually ask whether the carrier was incompetent or evil. This time, the answer is a little different.

BATCo tried to be evil. They buried a clause in a settlement agreement designed to handcuff us for two years and run out the clock on millions of dollars in legitimate claims. That is not incompetence. That is a plan.

The problem is that they were too incompetent to be good at being evil. They picked a two-year prohibition that happened to match the two-year statute of limitations exactly, which meant every claim we couldn’t file was simply waiting for us on the other side. They didn’t run out the clock. They just told us precisely when to set our alarm.

Evil requires competence to be effective. BATCo brought only one of the two. And that, dear reader, is why we were able to fly the chopper home with $2 million in claims and a clear conscience.

Incompetent or evil? In this case, both. And it still didn’t work.

Should We Work Together?

Hi, I’m Rick Friedman, CEO of Anilix. This blog is my attempt to pull back the curtain on an industry that has made a science out of overcharging the companies that can least afford the distraction.

When I’m not writing, I run Anilix, a telecom cost reduction firm I co-founded in 1998. We work with companies large and small across every category of telecom spend: mobile, voice, data, and everything in between. We work on a contingency fee basis. That means no upfront cost, no retainer, and no invoice from us unless we save you money first.

If any of this sounds familiar, the invoices that never quite make sense, the rates you suspect aren’t optimal, the team that’s too busy keeping the lights on to audit invoices, let’s talk. A 30-minute call costs you nothing and usually tells us both everything we need to know.