Everyone has been impacted by the shutdown and we are receiving tons of calls from customers asking what they can do to reduce their monthly expenses.  Here are the top 7 things that we are doing right now.  Contact us today to discuss your situation and how we might be able to help you out.  Or get started by completing the FREE Technology Assessment.

1.  Request credits and/or relief from vendors.  If you are in a business that is shut down right now, many of the carriers are rolling out linkprograms and processes for suspending charges or giving credits during the shutdown.

2.  Do a FREE CityCare Technology Assessment (currently offered for FREE).  The assessment will allow us to look at all of your services and make recommendations will reduce your costs while meeting your needs now and after the shutdown.  Start the Assessment Now.

3.  Telecom Expense Management.  We have a few great TEM (Telecom Expense Management) options that allow are a great way for organizations to save money by having all of their invoices automatically loaded into the system, analyzed, and even paid.  Typically the cost is 2-4% of your monthly spend, but the savings found from unneeded services, billing errors, accounting time, and more will typically yield a 10-15% return.   

4.  Migrate to an SD WAN network.  If you are using MPLS or private line connections to connect your offices and people, we should look at moving your to an SD WAN network.  You can use cheaper connections, have more visibility and control, and best of all it is simple to deploy.  You can even add devices to some or all of your work-from-home employees to help them prioritize business traffic like phone calls and video calls over Netflix and Xbox streaming.  

5.  Migrate to a Hosted Phone System for your office workers and contact center personnel.  All of our providers are offering special incentives, low or no term agreements, and fast-start options to get your people connected and working from home.  Best of all, when the shutdown is over, you can continue to use the solutions in the office or at home.

6.  Consider Carrier Aggregation.  Some of our customers have found savings in switching carriers and/or aggregating their services with one of our carrier aggregators.  Typically you can aggregate things like:  Broadband Internet, POTs lines, and mobile devices and plans.   

7.  Review cell phone and mobile device options.  It is painful to migrate everyone over to a new carrier with new devices.  We can do it if your current carrier(s) aren’t working for you, or we can look at one of our aggregation carriers that will help you set limits, manage usage plans, and handle upgrading and replacing devices.  The service typically pays for itself and then some, by reducing overages and soft-cost time of dealing with all of it.  You can also lock down devices to only be used for business applications as we continue to evolve in this work-from-home environment.

Working with strategic customers in your territory
Who is your largest and best-paying customer? Do you want more of those? Would you like one that is double that size? Ten times that size? A hundred times that size? Let me introduce you to City Care.
When we look at our customer base (the customers we serve on behalf of our dealers and agents), the majority are small-to-mid-size businesses (SMB). These are good business for us. They need what we sell and in aggregate, provide our dealers and agents with healthy revenue. But there are a handful of Most Valuable Players in our portfolio, Enterprise accounts who need tons of carrier and network services.
Enterprise customers demand a lot, but in return give our dealers their most-rewarding business relationshsips. These accounts are so good that as well building a healthy SMB business, we spend some time focused purely on landing Enterprise customers. We want to help you do the same.


The 250-year old telecom veteranOur primary mission is to help you bring telecom services to your customers; to support you with a product portfolio that pays, sales help that closes, and post-sales support that makes your customers appreciate you.  To do this, we’ve built a team of a dozen or so staffers, each dedicated to one piece of this mission. Besides the three partners, we have sales specialists, technical and support staff, provisioning and carrier service staff, and product-specialists.
We are all telecom veterans. Before coming to City, we had all worked 15 or more years for carriers, manufacturers, or as telecom managers. Together, we account for over 250-years of experience in every aspect of telecom – negotiating agreements, managing services, designing high-end contact centers, and installing and running every kind of system from tiny key systems to carrier switches.
As a team, we have a high level of success in building a long-term customer base in partnership with our dealers and agents. Our best work comes when we serve the ideal customer outlined at the top of this post; a customer one that let’s us take care of all their telecom services, that sees our team as an extension of their company, that uses their telecom department.
Large, complex customers spend tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month of telecom network and infrastructure. They may employ dedicated telecom staff but more often, the responsibility for telecom has been rolled into the IT department or chopped into pieces and handed to management, accounting, or other internal staff. Knowing that it is a complex job to provisioning and project manage telecom networks, oversee installation and maintenance of ever-more-complicated communications systems, and stay on top of carrier agreements and bills, they need the kind of help we can give.


The bag of tricks we call City CareTargeted at this specific kind of customer, we developed a boutique telecom-management service we call City Care. We act as a single source for all telecommunications design, planning, procurement, project management, contract negotiation, billing audit, troubleshooting, and problem resolution. It works because when someone contracts us for City Care, we then place all orders for them related to the products and services in our portfolio.
Find a customer we can contract with to manage all aspects of their telecom is a great way to open a door that otherwise might be closed to you. City Care puts us inside the biggest customers in a territory, working on the customer side of the table, serving them with our expertise and knowledge?


City Care by the numbers

• Inventory and Contract Management – We build and maintain an active inventory of all telecom services. We use a trouble-ticketing and order-management system to keep complete records of all adds, moves, and changes.
• Procurement and Provisioning – We research all options nationwide, present options, and implement orders on the customer’s behalf. We project manage the installation and delivery of all services.
• Level One Support – When a customer has an issue with any of the products or services under our umbrella, we act as the single-source for resolution. We open and manage trouble tickets, we sit on the phone for as long as it takes with the carriers and service providers to resolve the issue, we can coordinate with the multiple vendors that may be involved in hunting a problem down, and we provide reporting to the customer to help educate and optimize their telecom network and infrastructure.
• Project management – We offer consulting, market-research and solution recommendations for all projects under the communications-technology umbrella (unified communications, contact-center, SD-WAN, cloud-deployed communications infrastructure, business analytics, etc.)
• Billing management – We can perform routine telecom billing audits. We open cases and pursue credits and reconciliations with carriers. Optionally, we can aggregate customer bills into single statements.

We charge a small monthly service fee, a percentage of the cost of all services under our management, and require all future carrier network services be placed through us (so we can capture commissions from carriers and service providers to pay us (and you) for our work).


Do you have a City Care candidate in your territory?Again, the best candidate for this customized service is a larger enterprise where IT has control/responsibility for the network (carrier services, billing, telecom infrastructure, wide-area network, etc.). A great example is an Arizona-based customer we serve. They are a rapidly growing internet company who sells used cars directly to consumers. Their growth demands constant new carrier connections. Their rapid-growth also requires they focus on advancing the technology they run their business on and they need to outsource the professional discipline of telecom management. We serve as their outsource telecom-management department, under the direction of the IT staff.
Work with your channel manager to identify a list of target companies in your territory that might be a propect for City Care. Let’s work together to develop a relationship with that customer and set yourselves up for the most lucrative long-term customer in your portfolio.