Game of Telecom Thrones

Be forewarned: I am about to make a sweeping, unsupported generalization with a degree of overconfidence that has only been surpassed by my college friend, Greg, who can speak authoritatively on virtually any topic whether he knows anything about it or not.

Certain costs can NEVER be optimized. Let me mansplain this to you. I currently pay for, let's call it, 8 different streaming services that my kids, now in their 20s, have had access to since the Obama Administration. As a Finance professional, I could do a dNPV calculation (yeah, that's a depressing Net Present Value calculation) of my streaming costs out into perpetuity.

Instead, I am going to fire up HBO, rewatch a few episodes of Game of Thrones, and use whatever is left of my brain after that to connect it to mobile telecom. And like the constant war stories throughout GoT, you will be treated to the entertaining and gruesome war stories of some of our customers' mobile telecom experiences.

"You Know Nothing, Jon Snow"

For the three readers who have never seen Game of Thrones, let me explain. There is a hero, Jon Snow. He gets stranded in the wilderness, meets a badass red-haired woman, who repeatedly tells him that he really, truly knows nothing about how the world works. For anyone who knows me and my history of receiving similar input from a red-haired woman, yes, I have checked with the writers and producers of GoT to see if they based this on my life. Suspiciously, they have not gotten back to me. But I digress.

Our customer, a healthcare-related technology company, brought us in to review their voice and data services to identify opportunities for savings. Great! Our very organized point of contact provided an accounting extract of their communications costs across their 11 different vendors. Perfect! As we had discussed, there were no mobile costs from the likes of AT&T Wireless or Verizon Wireless on the list, because the customer did not offer corporate mobile phones to their employees. Except, you know nothing, Jon Snow! Buried among those 11 vendors, we identified costs typically associated with the management of mobile phones and devices. Somewhat less great. No actual costs for the devices themselves, meaning that these costs were for the management of Imaginary Phones, which Apple does not sell to my knowledge, or that mobile expenses were hidden elsewhere. Not quite perfect.

We debriefed our customer, who responded "Oh shoot," although possibly I have gotten a vowel or two wrong in what was actually said. After some digging, we uncovered the actual costs for their mobile program hidden elsewhere on the P&L. Our customer also commented to us: "Fortunately, we have employed a company whose job is to manage the provisioning, deprovisioning, and helpdesk for our mobile phones while also optimizing our costs." Let's pause for a moment here. Did I don a long red wig and tell our customer, "You know nothing, Jon Snow"? I did not. Did our head of operations have to talk me out of it? Possibly. Based on our analysis, we reduced the costs for this “nonexistent” mobile program by more than 50%.

Red Wedding

Fans of Game of Thrones will recall the Red Wedding as an event that was supposed to be joyous, happy, and full of family bonding, but instead turned into one of television's most infamous bloodbaths. Somewhat similar to my brief foray into online dating in 2014, but I digress. Here's the deal: a big wedding meant to unite two families ended with most of the main characters dead, the result of an evil scheme by an elderly man wearing an AT&T Wireless shirt. Or possibly I am misremembering his attire. As a Scifi/Fantasy fan who had read the books, I was still on the edge of my seat. As a boring telecom cost executive, I had only one thought: I bet nobody is going to remember to turn off all of those dead people's mobile phones.

For most companies, there are no Red-Wedding-style corporate bloodbaths, involving swords, axes, and lances, although I have never attended the Verizon Wireless Holiday party, so I can't be 100% certain. What does seem to occur with some regularity is that employees leave. For new jobs at different companies, retirement, a sabbatical, for reasons related to job performance, or perhaps even to spend more time perfecting their online dating profiles (I may have digressed again, sorry). The point is: Employees leave. Their mobile devices and other tech generally gets turned in. For many reasons, a large percentage of their mobile devices do not get removed from service. For one of our customers, a distributor with lots of drivers with phones, we have identified and disconnected over 300 devices in 9 separate projects over a 4-year-period. This is real money. No need for a Red-Wedding-type budgetary bloodbath!

Winter Is Coming

In my family this phrase means one thing: Ski season is almost upon us, I need to update my OpenSnow subscription, and I should consider (as I do every year) upgrading my beloved but somewhat elderly powder skis. In GoT, this means two things: The weather is going to turn nasty, and something horribly evil is approaching. That said, when GoT's winter did arrive, the snow looked fluffy and ski-able, and the trees looked like they were spaced quite well for the slope they were on. But I digress. From a telecom perspective, "Winter Is Coming" can only mean that the all-pervasive evil of fraud is always lurking, waiting to emerge like a White Walker in a blizzard.

For a US-based entertainment and resort concern, we noticed something odd, a device roaming internationally and making international long-distance calls. Sure. It could have been a senior executive traveling abroad with his or her family on vacation but, as we always do, we had to check it out. It was a tablet, which had been utilized previously for basic administrative tasks on site. Typically, this type of device would not be used internationally for a company with only US operations. More so, rarely would such devices make outbound voice calls. We looked harder. Some troll-like evil doer had somehow yanked the SIM card from the tablet, inserted it into a phone, and proceeded to spend five figures over a couple of weeks. Because we are always concerned that Winter Is Coming, we found the problem mid-billing cycle, identified its root cause, worked with the carrier to address the issue, and had the carrier credit all of the fraud-related charges back. Bottom line: if you are an Anilix customer and you hear that Winter Is Coming, you need only be concerned about whether or not your ski clothes still fit and your quads are in shape.

"I Drink and I Know Things"

My favorite GoT character is Tyrion Lannister, generally the smartest and drunkest person in the room. Possibly, this is a result of my age, where smelling alcohol, watching other people drink, and even seeing a beer commercial can lead to a hangover (am I digressing again?). In telecom terms, I'd flip the order: it's not that I drink and therefore know things, it's that I know things and therefore need a drink, despite the possibility of a hangover that might by itself shatter The Wall that the Night Watch patrols.

One of our customers, a construction company that had grown considerably through acquisition, came to us with mobile service scattered across 6 to 7 different entities. Different contracts, different account structures, different bills. As we expected (and the customer did not), we went line by line, entity by entity, invoice by invoice, and brought the whole mess down by 56 percent. One might assume that since the Anilix team had unleashed our "dragons" on the evil telecom/enemy fleet and won, we would be considered heroes. Alas, our job was only half done. We had also promised to consolidate the many, many invoices received into the fewest number possible. Since we know things about telecom, telecom invoices, and the back-ass-ward nature of telecom billing systems, we wanted a drink!

The process of consolidating these invoices lasted longer than Evil King Joffrey's reign. Also, possibly with more murderous thoughts directed at the customer service representatives, customer services supervisors, and account managers who tried and failed many times in this endeavor. Hodor would have done a better job! Eventually, and without a single bottle of whiskey being expensed by an Anilix employee, every line item was consolidated onto a single invoice. Except for 15 phones that appeared to be as immoveable as Gregor, The Mountain, Clegane.

Fine. Maybe you are geek enough to remember that Gregor does eventually die. So yes, those 15 lines eventually were moved. I am pretty sure we tried everything else first, but in the end, we had to briefly disconnect service and reprovision them with different rate plans to make it happen.

Let's wrap up these customer war stories with some important information. No actual dragons were harmed in the writing of this article. No whiskey bottles were endangered. OK, not many whiskey bottles. And naturally, my streaming services

remain either completely unoptimized (per me) or completely optimized (per my kids).

Each war story, from the imaginary phones, to the dead people still roaming the invoice, to the troll with the stolen SIM, to the 15 lines more stubborn than Gregor Clegane, has the same moral. Something evil (or is it incompetent?) was lurking on a telecom invoice, raising costs and causing operational headaches for our customers. It does not matter if this was evil or incompetence. What matters is that somewhere on your own telecom bill, Winter Is Coming. The good news is that figuring it out does not require a bloody wedding, a drinking problem, or a trip to the Wall. It just requires someone who knows where to look.

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.