It is the middle of the work day. Do you know where your MAC attainment is? Better not rely on the carrier to know.
With another carrier negotiation comes another insight that the carriers have become so big that many times they are not even sure how they are billing enterprises for their wireless. Nor do they understand their own complicated rate structures or their own math for their requirements they mandate customers abide.
We recently underwent 4 very long iterations of MAC (minimum annual commitment) attainment figures with a carrier and one of our customers. The original current MAC attainment given by the carrier was overstated by 20%. That is, when we asked what the customer was spending today in MAC attainment numbers, they gave us a figure that was well above what the customer was actually spending. This is troublesome only because that is the amount that the carrier uses as a determining factor in the discount structures. If you are spending more, you get a bigger discount which is great– unless what the enterprise is spending is not what the enterprise is actually spending. Then, you get penalized by a lower discount.
Because of our industry knowledge and previous negotiations like this, we (The Bill Police aka TBP) debated the MAC amount several times with the carrier coming back each time stating that the previous figures were indeed incorrect. Their MAC number kept decreasing; ours remained constant. We even heard a statement made that said, “here is the correct MAC. The old MAC was wrong, but we can’t tell you why”. Really.
They even asked if we could provide them information on how to come up with our MAC number and why their figures were incorrect. Really.
Those conversations were still 2 MAC discussions before the final where our numbers finally were confirmed after seeing that in the last attempt, the carrier had added several items two times and therefore falsely inflated their numbers. Math: can be tricky sometimes. Yes, really.
Let us end on a happy note that the outcome was a better overall financial position for the customer in the end (to the tune of about a 20% savings each month on the bill from what they were spending). In the carrier’s defense, they are not in the business of making your bills right nor optimized. That’s our job. Their job is to get you a device that allows you to be mobile while doing business and being exceptionally more productive. They do pretty well with that.
So, keep a check on your MAC. It may be wandering aimlessly with no control nor oversight and if you aren’t watching it, few others are — keep it safe.
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