According to numbers from Mobile Device Management company Amtel, Inc., a company with over 50k mobile lines has as many as 5k mobile lines that aren’t being used, but the company is still paying for. This accounts for about 10% of an enterprises telecom bill, and figuring the value of a mobile cellular line is $60/month, enterprises could be losing as much as $3.6 million dollars annually from what has become known as “Zombie Phones” in the telecom expense management and mobile device management industries.
In fact the problem has become so pervasive that just last week, a Westside Chicago recycling company, Sims Recycling Solutions, announced an online buyback program targeting these Zombie Phones by name, encouraging people to recycle them. But as you might guess, depending on the type of Zombie Phone we’re talking about, even smashing a phone to bits and melting it down might not even be enough to kill them.
What is needed is an expert team who know how to kill a Zombie Phone in organizations with an arsenal of tools like cellular rate plan optimization and other methods that can identify and kill the Zombie Phones for good. Amtel MDM solution claims to have this experience, and is offering to play the role of Zombie Phone Killers for organizations looking for this service, most will have at least 500 mobile lines and up to as many as 50,000 or more. The more lines a company has, the more money can be saved from constant telecom budget draining devices.
See the infographic on how much exactly can be saved based on company size and the number of mobile lines.
CIO also went over the dangers of Zombie Phones and put companies with between 500 and 50,000 mobile lines on alert, quoting PJ Gupta, CEO of Amtel Inc. as saying, “…it’s almost certain you have zombie phones.” So how does a dead phone rise again? Well there are two ways this happens:
- Walking Dead: The Walking Dead Zombie Phone rises when former employees are allowed to keep their business phones and transfer the bill to their name. In about 10% of cases the transfer does not go through. This means that the carrier service is still on the company bills, and these risen zombie phones are now eating money from company coffers.
- Buried Alive: The second way a Zombie Phone comes into existence is from being Buried Alive. In this scenario, the employee returns the device to the company IT or Human Resources department where it gets placed in a cardboard box (doesn’t have to be cardboard BTW) and for whatever reason the carrier contract is still attached to the phone. This causes these buried cell phones to rise again, sucking valuable telecom resources from the company.
To give people a better understanding, and just in time to scare your IT and maybe even Human Resources department for Halloween, Amtel put together this Zombie Phone Infographic, and what can be done to do away with the pesky, resource-sucking, money eating devices from within your organization.
