Devious Telecoms Account Managers

Purely by accident we've have been sent a contract renewal notice for 24 months of telecomms services that was meant for one of our previous clients. We've of course rejected the notice as we should not have seen it and sent a copy of our rejection to our contact in the client's offices.

We couldn't help noticing however that the contract renewal has subtly changed from the original terms of contract which we helped to set up a couple of years ago. Part of our services is to help to reduce the cost of telecoms for our clients. We don't charge any extra for this, but by careful sourcing we can typically halve the operational telecoms costs for our clients. In this case we'd arranged that all outgoing calls would be directed via another vendor B resulting in substantial savings, on our advice our client rented only the incoming phone lines  from the vendor A (who wrongly sent us the contract renewal mentioned above). Vendor A had previously been the route for outgoing traffic, but had been grossly overcharging for voice traffic. Needless to say the Vendor A account manager was quite distressed when an assumed revenue stream dried up; he'd not listened to our clear warnings.

We noticed in the new contract, from Vendor A, that they've now bundled an outgoing calls package in the price with a "minimum committed annual usage." There are now no technical personnel on the site of the client office and they've outsourced support to a large Indian offshore company. At a stroke whoever agreed to the "renewal" in our client has committed them to 24 months additional expenditure on outgoing calls they will not use. This will result in ten's of thousands of pounds of additional expenditure. It just goes to show that a lack of knowledge can be very expensive when it comes to telecoms technology.