Interviewer: One of the biggest expenses in any business whether that is small or large one is the communications and especially when it comes to mobile phones. Well how do you save money? There are so many different plans and a lot of times they’re quite confusing especially when you start getting into the data plans as well. I got Kent Hawkins from Alliance One to help us figure out how to save that money that we all desperately need, thanks for joining us.
Kent Hawkins: Yes, thanks for having me.
Interviewer: So I have a small business and a dozen cell phones but is there a significant amount of money that I can save if I mange my bills better?
Kent Hawkins: Yes, definitely, a lot of corporations don’t realize the number of different options that there are out there for the great plans like you say both on the voice side and the data side.
Interviewer: Tell me about what you guys do and I found this quite fascinating, you will actually manage the cell phones for a company.
Kent Hawkins: Yes, exactly, so what we do is instead of them having a teleconference in there office trying to sort or figure out what rate plans are best for everyone which can be really time consuming and tedious. We actually designed and developed a software that does that for them.
Interviewer: And how does that work, so I’m a company I’ll phone you up and what’s the next step?
Kent Hawkins: What we do is we contact your carrier and we get an electronic version of that bill and each month we bring that bill into our system. Once we have that in there in our system we can do an analysis on that bill to see whose on the right rate plans and who is on the wrong ones.
Interviewer: What sized company is this typically good for?
Kent Hawkins: So any company that’s kind of ten phones plus, so anyone that qualifies for a corporate plan with the carrier.
Interviewer: So from the businesses that you’ve worked with so far, what kind of savings have they seen by working with you guys?
Kent Hawkins: So what we typically see per phone is about $250.00 per year per phone.
Interviewer: That’s quite significant, so if we have ten phones, that’s $2,500.00.
Kent Hawkins: Yes, exactly.
Interviewer: And so what’s in it for you, like how do you guys make money?
Kent Hawkins: The way we work is we do a percentage of savings, so its great for the customer because there’s no out of pocket money, we just charge them on a percentage of what we save them.
Interviewer: And what would that be?
Kent Hawkins: Its 40% actually.
Interviewer: 40% but you know when you’re looking at saving thousands of dollars, 40% of that, I mean that’s basically found money.
Kent Hawkins: Exactly.
Interviewer: To get started basically they just phone you guys up and you manage the rest of it going forth?
Kent Hawkins: Exactly, so once they decide to start with our services, there is just one form that they sign which is a consent form to access the electronic version of their bill and from that point on we take over their account. Each month we review their account and see if there’s any changes and then we actually contact the carrier and make those changes so they can eliminate any contact that they have with the carrier. So that means no waiting on the phone, on hold anymore or no you know name changes on the account to whatever. We take that all over for them.
Interviewer: And how involved does the business do I have to be, do you guys just manage the whole thing, do you have to phone me all the time?
Kent Hawkins: We just provide you with an email saying the changes that we made for that month and then each quarter we send a report showing you the savings that we’ve provided, so for you. You know we could operate in the back ground and you can just go above your core confidence using focus on your business instead of worrying about the newest and greatest rate plans that are out there.
Interviewer: Well that’s great, where can people find that more information about Alliance One?
Kent Hawkins: Yes, the best is our website which is www.allianceone.cs.
Interviewer: Great, so Kent Hawkins from Alliance One, thanks for joining us on the show and a great way if you have a business and a number of cell phones to save a chunk of money.
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