by Sheikh Ali // Calero-MDSL

Now more than ever, businesses in this globally connected world are turning to Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions to enable seamless collaboration.

However, despite its many benefits, the transformational switch to UCaaS can be troublesome for businesses that depend on traditional expense tracking systems. Without a clear understanding of consumption, costs, pricing, and services, UCaaS spending can be challenging to understand and control.

This article explores the factors contributing to the UCaaS spend explosion and explains how businesses can take back control with a UCaaS expense management solution.

UCaaS Expense Management vs. Technology Expense Management

The concept of unified communications has been around for years. Still, the pandemic has compounded it as necessary by enabling employees to collaborate anywhere and on any device.

At its core, unified communications provide and combine multiple communications channels, such as voice, video, messaging, and content sharing for greater business agility. The UCaaS model makes the comprehensive technology stack more accessible since you don't need to invest time and money in setting up and maintaining your own infrastructure.

However, this subscription-based service holds new challenges for business leaders due to a lack of visibility to expenditure and usage. That's where a UCaaS expense management solution can bring significant value.

A UCaaS expense management solution ensures that while employees continue to use the right communication tools, it provides the enterprise a granular insight into how cloud-based UCaaS usage can be optimized to benefit their bottom line.

While technology expense management (TEM) solutions tend to focus on traditional IT expenses, a UCaaS expense management solution brings visibility into cloud-based subscriptions, usage, and licenses, which can be a significant source of waste, if not properly managed.

3 Main Challenges in the UCaaS Spend Explosion

UCaaS platforms keep teams productive and portable for enhanced productivity. However, business executives can run into certain hidden pitfalls when implementing UCaaS systems, causing them to lose control over their spending.

1. Volume

Since the pandemic sparked an overwhelming boom in "Work from home," manually tracking technology utilization has become virtually impossible with traditional spreadsheets or vendor billing methods. Even before the pandemic struck, larger companies with employees based worldwide struggled to effectively manage all this UCaaS data.

In addition, monitoring large volumes of subscription and licensing expense data is no longer feasible. Managing UCaaS expenses in this way isn't only inefficient, it also leads to an increased risk of human error and more severe oversights.

2. Variability

No two UCaaS platforms are the same. While most platforms offer a universal approach to online communication, pricing, contracts, and features differ significantly depending on the provider. In addition, UCaaS platforms lack a standardized pricing structure, making it challenging for business leaders to accurately compare providers and obtain the best deal for their budget.

Without valid, actionable data from UCaaS providers, business leaders struggle to negotiate the most efficient contracts with providers, leading to cost unpredictability and wasted dollars.

3. Visibility

Failing to acquire visibility into UCaaS usage and consumption cost results in a lack of control over UCaaS spending. Business leaders require granular data on consumption, the number of users, and license distribution to identify efficiencies and potential manage chargebacks.

Moreover, financial teams have to juggle multiple dashboards and various data troves to keep on top of spending. This is impractical and can lead to severe and expensive oversights.

Reduce Costs with a UCaaS Expense Management Solution

According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will prioritize collaboration and meeting platforms over voice-only telephony, a massive leap from just 30% in 2019. With companies moving towards a more flexible, hybrid way of working, business leaders could reassess their needs and implement UCaaS systems.

To ensure organizations gain the full benefits of their UCaaS solutions, forward-thinking business leaders must achieve cost optimization and reduce their expenditure by implementing a UCaaS expense management solution for lowered costs and better data insights. Organizations can harness the power of UCaaS expense management for greater cost efficiency in five main ways:

Visibility and Reporting

A UCaaS expense management solution provides the enterprise with valuable insights from UCaaS vendors, identity management solutions, and API-native integrations so that finance teams can eliminate waste and optimize UCaaS expenditure and consumption.

Predictive Analytics

An expense management application empowers business executives to use predictive analytics to examine consumption data for any type of service (telephony, IM, Video conferencing, Meetings, etc.) at any level (location, department, unit, and user, etc.), as well as across the entire organization, to identify cost inefficiencies and improve budget allocation.

Call Validation

UCaaS expense management solutions incorporate the capabilities of established call accounting systems to validate call records against contracted rates. The system will identify discrepancies in usage and provide visibility so that enterprises can manage usage and drive calling plan optimizations - user by user.

Usage and Cost Optimization

An effective expense management solution will offer a holistic overview of UCaaS consumption and provide recommendations on how enterprises can optimize their usage for more significant cost savings. The solution will make it much easier to quickly identify unnecessary and redundant services and costs and significantly increase the value of their UCaaS dollars.

Automatic Cost Allocation

The right UCaaS expense management solution enables integration with the general ledger and HRIS system for automatic cost allocation to each employee across the organization. The UCaaS management solution provides a complete lifecycle solution for processing, validating, allocating, and optimizing your UCaaS environments by reducing the resources spent on tedious tasks like data entry and removing the risk of human error.

Regain Control of your UCaaS Expenses

Discover, manage and optimize your UCaaS subscriptions with the most intuitive UCaaS Expense Management platform in the market. Gain complete visibility into your UCaaS consumption and cost to identify underutilized subscriptions and discover optimizations for immediate cost savings.

Connect with one of our consultants today for a free consultation and a demo to explore the benefits of our one-stop-shop solution for effective UCaaS expense management.

TeleSwitch partners with Calero-MDSL, offering superior technology expense management solutions that are effective, intuitive, and simple to adopt, allowing customers to regain control of their technology expenses while saving money and increasing efficiencies.

You can find the original source and some additional information by visiting the Calero-MDSL website