Do you take care of cell phones at your work? 2

[acuratsx]

I'm curious if anyone has cell phone responsabilities at work and what it's like to be the cell phone person.

Pros & Cons, thank you.

 

[MassDeployer]

I work for a Hospital
We have about 1,500 cells/PDA - It's a nightmare.

Supporting end uers is rediculas and is very irratating. And they cannot be with out it. They cannot wait for there phone to arrive so the persistanatly call for status.

Another issue is people transfer to another dept or quit and no one reports the change.

We have about 200 different dept. and everyone assume we <IT> should know what, how manny and how much they bought or spent.

I hate it


Kind Regards,

MassDeployer

 

[anationalacrobat]

At my last job, phones was a hot potato bounced around. Since we were using a mix of standard and berry phones, I asked that they at least keep us informed when new hires happened. Of course, they didn't. The payroll person in accounting was in charge of the phones and would hand us the berries for setup on the berry server. What would end up happening was Nextel would screw up and setup the berries with a standard phone plan, no data service, thus they would never sync, could never sync! And it was always a production to get things straightened out over the phone.

Once we got things down to a system, it wasn't too bad. If someone needed a new phone, accounting would take care of the number porting and we'd get the new handset. Enable sync in BES, sync phone, hand off to the employee when sync is complete. But I could see how this would become an all-consuming nightmare if I had to deal with four or five times the number of users.

 

[Toni269]

I've got about the same number of blackberries on Verizon Wireless as Susan, about 130, on pooled voice, unlimited data, tethering for Internet access, text, and International roaming plans as needed - Our crew moves around a lot in a 24x7 emergency response type environment.

I hot swap with identical hardware same day and hand out whatever accessories they need as long as it's not bluetooth headsets (because of the cost and hassle to train them on the registration).

Keeping up with them technically and hardware swaps, dealing with Verizon is a breeze and customers are happy campers. The problem is in dealing with my boss EVERY SINGLE month when the bill comes.

I keep people on whatever plan that keeps the overages to an absolute minimum, on a $13-$15k bill every month, there may be like $300 or so in overages for some random 411 or text messaging I didn't expect a user to use.

There is no way in heck I would ever take the time to track where they are calling or pry into their personal lives, I could care less, I see that as the boss's job to make sure their work is getting done, I keep the calling plans in order and hardware in check and spares on hand.

When buying blackberry replacements, accessories and the monthly plan, divided by the users comes out to an average of about $120/month per user.

I don't deal well with the micromanagement of who is calling where and if this person or that person should or shoulden't have a cell phone and why is Sally's bill $300 this month, every single month for the last 3 years, it's because we bought new hardware or they went to Europe for 2 weeks for the sales meeting, they aren't overages, just the cost of doing business.

Rare, rare cases I have called the user and said hey - do you really need 4,000 text messages? (Yeah, the servers crashed and the notification messages were sent automatically or my kid uses it at night I didn't realize the charges) and we just handle it, usually Verizon will give a retroactive credit or the user adjust the situation on their end. For the most part the users are very good at not abusing so I feel lucky there, but there has GOT to be an easier way to manage the calling plans and keep the boss happy or get the bill down, but I'm out of ideas.

I'm considering calling an outsource provider that does bill analysis have a look at it or outsource the entire process, but I would hate to have the customer service level go down for my users.

If anyone has any ideas for cost savings on the cell phone bills, whatever they may be it will be greatly appreciated!

Toni