Cut the Cost of your Business Phone Bill

Making phone calls on a daily basis allows any company to keep in touch with their client base as well as generating new prospects and no company can function without being able to make and receive phone calls. A phone bill can cost any business a lot of money, but can you cut the cost of your phone bill?

The short answer is yes, there are a few simple steps you can take to save your business money. In some cases hundreds or even thousands of pounds can be saved. Here are a few steps you can take that will help you to save money and you could see the difference almost immediately.

Review your Phone Bill

Your bill is always the first place you should start looking to make savings. Your phone bill will give you a breakdown of your calls and charges so you can see where a lot of your costs are generated. If you don’t have an itemised bill then you will struggle to make savings because you won’t be able to identify any expensive calls that have been made. You will need to speak to your service provider to add itemised billing to your account that might incur an additional cost but the return of investment outweighs the extra expenditure so this cost is negligible.

Line Rental

This is such a basic charge that sometimes it is over looked, but you should because line rental isn’t free and the charge appears on your phone bill. It doesn’t matter if you make any calls or not you will still be charged for the phone line. It can be more cost effective to look around to see who is providing cheaper Line Rental, but you will have to compare that against the cost of call charges and try to find the best deal for you.

International Calls

Making phone calls to another country can send the cost of your phone bill sky high, currently BT have a standard tariff of 75p a minute to India and 30p a minute for calls to the USA. There are a lot of other providers out there who are very competitive so it is worth shopping around to find the best deal.

Call Minutes

Getting free minutes in your bundle deal may seem like a good way to save money, but certain providers charge a higher price if you go over your monthly allowance compared to a fixed price package. The best way to avoid this is to have an accurate idea of how many minutes you will use in a month and then buy a fixed price call bundle that will mean you have enough minutes available avoiding any extortionate call charges.

Payment Charges

If you pay your phone bill using other methods rather than a direct debit your provider may charge you for not paying using their preferred payment method. You can avoid any of these charges by switching your payment method to coincide with their policies.

Call Barring

Sometimes not all calls made from your business are always legitimate calls so with your itemised bill you can target calls that may not be used with the business in mind. That isn’t to say that it is your staff it could be someone else such as a cleaner or even a visitor to your premises. Call barring is a way of stopping any of these calls being made without your permission and you can even specify certain numbers to be barred such as 07 or 0845 type numbers. This can save you a substantial amount of money throughout the year.

Change your Phone Number

Businesses have tried to reduce the number of 0800 free phone numbers by replacing them with 0870 or 0845 numbers. They are cheaper for your business to maintain but on the flip side are more expensive for anyone to call compared to local or geographic numbers. There are websites available that will find the cheaper geographic number so calling any other company will be cheaper for you.

There are numerous ways to reduce your phone bill but it will take time to investigate and a little work to find out where you can reduce your phone bill, but you should start seeing the difference almost immediately so it is worth looking into.