Has an employee resigned, gone on parental leave or gone on long-term sick leave? If so, there is often a very complicated process involved in getting the company’s mobile phone subscription unblocked. In this post, we go through some common scenarios and provide tips on how to deal with the challenges.
Procedures for offboarding
When an employee leaves, it is important that the company has established procedures to ensure that everything is done correctly. However, offboarding is often neglected – and the employee leaves the company faster than planned, leaving many loose ends behind. Not least in terms of contracts and subscriptions.
The employee may even take their company phone home with them, making it difficult to even keep track of what type of subscription they had. It is therefore crucial that companies have a clear process for offboarding, and procedures that are easy to follow, both for the manager, the employee and the IT manager.
Tip: It’s a good time to review your company’s IT security when someone leaves. Here’s how you can update your company’s security in 10 minutes.
Expensive final bills for long lock-in periods
It’s not uncommon to either have to continue paying an extra month or quarter on a company subscription for someone’s mobile – just because you failed to cancel the contract in time. The worst case scenario is that the subscription has just been extended or replaced, and you’re stuck for up to another year or two! The final invoice for the remaining contract period is then rarely a pleasant sight.
Long, fixed contracts are rarely an advantage for any business – but perhaps especially risky for those who have high staff turnover or need to scale up and down operations at short intervals.
What about the cell phone itself? It usually ends up in a drawer somewhere and there are usually far too many unused used phones in company drawers. This is not sustainable from either an economic or environmental point of view.
Company mobile subscriptions during leave or sick leave
For example, if an employee goes on parental leave or long-term sick leave, this also poses challenges for the company. There is a risk that for a year, or more, you may have to pay for a subscription that is simply not being used by anyone. Some operators allow the contract to be paused while the employee is absent, which is an advantage to save on the cost itself.
However, the challenge remains that the calls that normally come in via the employee in question just stop. Since many people also use their company mobile phone privately, it cannot simply be handed over to a substitute during leave, for obvious reasons.
The solution is licenses!
Having to pay a lot of money because you’re stuck with long subscriptions after an employee leaves is never desirable. But there are several ways to avoid this – especially if you choose to invest in a modern telephony and PBX solution.
Telavox has developed a solution where we offer company licenses instead of linking company mobile subscriptions directly to a specific individual. You can move the licenses freely between any employees, and each employee can manage their own mobile based on conditions and needs. For example, during parental leave, you can easily redirect incoming calls directly to the switchboard. The person on leave can then record a personalized voice message on their mobile number to let them know they are free. Read more about the benefits of IVR (Interactive Voice Response).
You can manage your phone licenses yourself and start and end licenses as you wish. The licenses have no fixed commitment periods; you only pay for what you actually use each month. If you have a peak season in March and April, and need to bring in a few extra employees for customer service, you can easily scale up to 50 users during this time alone, even though you usually only have 45. At the touch of a button, you can delete a license as soon as a colleague leaves or disappears – and just as easily start it up on the person’s replacement or successor two weeks later.
