The Telecom Expense Management Industry was virtually nonexistent until the early 1980s due to the presence of the monopoly of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, which meant that everybody had to use the only available telecommunications carrier and the only way to reduce expenditure on telecom bills was to reduce usage. However during the late 1990s competition between telecom service providers in USA had increased to the extent that most of them had started creating several different business packages to suit individual companies. Along with this came the rise in the number of companies who provided telecommunication services and this led to a large number of options available to businesses and more flexibility in choosing service providers. While some companies chose to continue the same telecom plan with the company they were previously dealing with, several setups started researching ways to reduce their expenses on telecommunication and its related services.
As there were initially no dedicated setups to help companies with any form of Telecommunications Expense Management, companies had to give their own employees the task of negotiating new contracts and/or finding alternative companies who had lower rates. The employees, mostly unskilled for these types of jobs, usually brought only marginal reductions in the expenditure on telecom companies. The opportunity of creating companies specializing in Telecom Expense Management was seen at this time by a few people who created small setups and started gaining experience in TEM. It was not until 1997 that a couple of high profile companies emerged which had their main specialization in Telecom Expense Management. After this point the Telecom Expense Management industry has shown an almost consistent growth.
Another reason for the recent growth of the Telecom Expense Management industry has been the advent of cellular phones as well as the internet. Previously telecom expenses were only limited to phone calls, but now data usage as well as cellular usage charges have come into play and companies have to spend large sums on these services as well. Therefore the management of expenses on all of these services has become too difficult for several companies to carry it out themselves and many have found it cheaper to outsource Telecom Expense Management to specialist companies instead of hiring its own people to do the job. This means that Telecom Expense Management firms today do not need just the basic knowledge about which company charges the least for phone calls but now they must also know about the cheapest internet service providers and cellular phone companies.
Although the Telecom Expense Management industry started and has currently made the most progress in the United States, several other countries have started using the method recently. These companies have mostly always found out about TEM through the internet and thus a demand has been created for it in several countries. The Telecommunications Expense Management industry now has an increasing presence in several Asian, European and African countries. Among these, India and The Philippines have statistically seen the largest growth as these two countries are the main receivers of outsourced call center work from developed countries. This means that a large number of corporations set up their call centers there and these call centers have to find the cheapest possible rates from service providers so that they may maximize their profits.
Thus, over the years the Telecom Expense Management industry has gone from nonexistent to a very successful operation whose services a large number of companies are acquiring daily. A number of successful TEL companies are functioning today, with an example of www.TelecomExpenseManagement.com which has also provided several different companies with substantial savings resulting from lower telecom expenses.
