Has an employee resigned, gone on parental leave, or been on long-term sick leave? Then, the tedious process of getting rid of the company subscription for the mobile phone is awaiting. In this post, we go through some common scenarios and give tips on dealing with the challenges.
Routines for offboarding
When an employee leaves, it’s essential that the company has established routines to ensure that everything proceeds smoothly. But most often, the offboarding process isn’t properly handled, and the employee disappears from the company faster than planned, leaving many loose ends behind – not least in terms of contracts and subscriptions.
The employee might even take the company mobile with them, making it difficult to track what type of subscription the phone had. Therefore, companies must have a straightforward offboarding process and easy-to-follow routines for the manager, the employee, and the IT manager.
Pro tip: Employee departures are a good opportunity to perform a security audit. Find out how to do that here.
Expensive final invoices with long-term commitment
It is not uncommon for you to continue paying an extra month or quarter on a company subscription for someone’s mobile just because you fail to cancel the contract in time. The worst case scenario is if the subscription has just been extended or replaced since you are then stuck for up to one or two more years. The final invoice for the remaining period is rarely pleasant reading.
Long, fixed contracts are seldom an advantage for any company – but perhaps above all, it’s risky for those with a significant staff turnover or who need to scale up and down at short intervals.
The mobile phone itself then? It often ends up in a drawer somewhere, and companies usually have far too many unused used phones. It's not sustainable from either an economic or environmental perspective.
Mobile company subscriptions in case of leave or sick leave
If, for example, an employee goes on parental or long-term sick leave, this also poses challenges for the company. There’s a risk that you may have to pay for a subscription that is simply not used by anyone for a year or more. Some operators allow the contract to be paused while the employee is absent, which means you can save on the cost itself.
On the other hand, the challenge remains that the calls that generally come in via the employee in question stop. Since many choose to use the company phone privately, it cannot, for obvious reasons, be handed over to a substitute during the leave.
The solution? Licenses!
Having to pay high costs because you’re stuck in long subscriptions after an employee quits is never desirable. But there are several ways to avoid this, significantly if you invest in a modern telephony solution.
At Telavox, we’ve developed a solution where we offer business licenses instead of linking business subscriptions for the mobile phone directly to a specific individual. You can move the licenses freely between any employees, and each employee can manage their own mobile based on conditions and needs. On parental leave, for example, you can easily redirect incoming calls directly to the PBX and have a personal voice message on your mobile number announcing that you are available. Read more about the benefits of Interactive Voice Response (IVR).
You can administer your phone licenses yourself and start and end licenses exactly as you want. The licenses don’t have fixed binding periods, but you only pay for what you actually use each month. Let’s say you usually have 45 employees for most of the year. If your peak season is in March and April, you might need to bring some temporary extra employees to the customer service team to cope with the increased workload. You can then easily scale up to 50 users during this specific period, and end the licenses after the peak has passed.
With the push of a button, you can remove a license as soon as a colleague leaves. And just as easily, you can add it to the person’s replacement or successor two weeks later. Licenses offer a more flexible solution which is perfectly suited to modern ways of working.
