Conclusion
If yours is a 500-user organisation, your annual mobile phone bill will be in the millions of dollars. With such a substantial sum at stake, you should be budgeting months for the task of evaluating and negotiating a mobile supply contract.
What you should end up with is an agreement significantly better than Telecom and Vodafone’s advertised plans (TelstraClear, as a Vodafone reseller, offers identical plans).
Even if competition in the New Zealand market remains limited, the arrival of number portability in April does at least provide some leverage as you renew an existing contract. Confronted with the fact that it’s now much simpler for customers to take their business to the rival network, the smiling face of your telco account manager should be even more beaming than before.
But, says the telecoms manager at one organisation consulted for this guide, don’t be fooled into thinking the account manager has real authority to wheel and deal. The people with the power to cut deals are the backroom marketers, accountants and lawyers who run their ruler over every offer before its presentation by the account manager.
That’s how it can take months to finalise a deal – each counter-offer can be expected to take a week to stitch together, and if you have Vodafone and Telecom engaged in a bidding war, the process is twice as long.
Another organisation we canvassed recommended hiring the services of an independent consultant to be sure you were getting the best possible deal. At the very least, you should be staying abreast of market and technology developments by reading telecommunications publications in print and online. But be mindful that there can be a lengthy lag between excited headlines about the latest technology revolution and its arrival in the form of products and services.
Another useful strategy is if you’re a Telecom customer, say, keep the lines of communication to Vodafone open so that it is familiar with your requirements and can acquaint you with new products or services that might be of value.
The question of whether you will extract a better deal by having all your eggs – landline, data and mobile services, say – in one basket, or gain bargaining power by dealing with a number of suppliers, isn’t clear cut.
What is clear, however, is that greater competition is coming. In the first instance it is through Vodafone’s acquisition of ihug, giving it a portfolio of local calling and wired broadband offerings; through MVNOs; and, eventually, in the shape of a third network. It’s the last possibility that customers view with the greatest anticipation.