mindWireless Top 10 Phone Management Tips

mindWireless Top 10 Phone Management Tips

In what ended up as a modern-day corporate cautionary tale, an employee of a major American corporation set off on a major business trip across Europe and Asia. On arriving home, she found she’d racked up a Verizon bill totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars — $247,850.21 to be exact.

While traveling through eight countries from March 11 through April 10, 2013, the employee used her Blackberry to send an email with an important presentation attachment. Unfortunately, the attachment was well over the 10-megabyte limit set by her company’s email server.

When the Blackberry failed to send the email it continuously retried, effectively turning the first 10 megabytes into a gargantuan 14 gigabytes of data usage. Since her mobile plan allowed for just 2 gigabytes of international data, she quickly went into overage.

Fortunately, her company uses mindWireless to manage and optimize corporate mobile plans. The company sent the bill to mindWireless to audit and develop an action plan. Knowing that the astounding bill could have easily been avoided, the experts at mindWireless moved quickly to help resolve the issue. After two months of discussion, mindWireless got Verizon to reduce the charges by 98.4%, the amount that would have been due if the employee had been using the proper plan for her international corporate travel.

In the spirit of this situation, we have come up with a Top 10 Phone Management Tips List to help you avoid nasty surprises on your phone bill when traveling internationally for business or pleasure:

1. Check Your Plan Options. Check into any special plans your company has for international travel. You may find out that you can access an unlimited global data plan for these circumstances — be sure to make use of them.
2. Call Your Carrier. Whatever your plan may be, call to educate yourself on how it works. Ask questions about things you anticipate that you may need to do while traveling. Become an educated consumer.
3. Add International Features. Adding an international feature to your phone will give you discounted voice and data rates. At just $6 for the month, you can reduce voice charges by about 50 cents per minute.
4. Don’t Be Roaming. Disable international roaming and use free or inexpensive WiFi, often available at your hotel. Use Vibr, Skype, TextPlus, or any of a number of free apps to get free email, texting and voice calls. If you have an iPhone, use iMessage for texting and Facetime for free video calls over WiFi.
5. Avoid Attachment Disorder. If you are roaming, avoid sending large files such as videos. Attachments like this can cost more than $50 per send.
6. No Pushing. Turn off push notifications. Set your phone so that you’ll only retrieve email when you are on WiFi.
7. Take Calls, Don’t Make Calls. Calls from the US to other countries are generally cheaper than calls mobile calls to the US. Ask contacts to call you at your hotel.
8. Buy a Phone, Don’t Bring a Phone. Consider purchasing a local phone at the airport when you land. You’ll likely get free incoming calls and find far better rates for local calls and data, too.
9. Just Unplug. Consider taking an electronics vacation. Making a complete break will help you avoid wireless bills that could easily exceed the cost of your trip.
10. When You Get Back, Go Back. When you return from your travels, remember to call in and turn off global data features and plans, or you’ll face about $35 in additional monthly charges that you are no longer using.

For leading brands, mindWireless reduces wireless expenses significantly, drives leading-edge mobile strategy and delivers pain-free device provision. Learn more or join a webinar at mindwireless.com