Byting Into Savings: Corporate Wireless Optimization Secrets from Stephanie Heys

Optimizing Wireless Expenses with Stephanie Hayes of Byte Analytics

In this episode of The Wireless Way, host Chris Whitaker interviews Stephanie Hayes, Head of Wireless Expense Analytics at Byte Analytics. They discuss the complexities of managed mobility and wireless expense management. Stephanie shares insights into how Byte Analytics optimizes corporate wireless billing to achieve measurable savings. The conversation covers common mistakes companies make in managing their wireless plans, the importance of using software for precision, and the role of AI in future optimizations. Stephanie also shares personal anecdotes about her travels and career journey. The episode concludes with actionable advice for finance leaders on avoiding overpaying wireless carriers.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:28 The Problem with Wireless Expenses
03:43 Stephanie Hayes' Background and Journey
05:04 Travel Stories and Personal Insights
07:32 Getting into Mobility Expense Management
10:17 Challenges in Wireless Billing
13:18 Global Optimization and Software Solutions
18:17 Challenges Faced by Mobility Providers
18:57 The Role of AI in Mobility Management
19:22 Ideal Customer Profiles and Market Opportunities
20:03 Global Optimization and Carrier Relations
24:02 Advice for Finance Leaders on Managing Carrier Costs
29:59 The Importance of Wireless Expense Management
31:03 Stephanie's Favorite Billing Story
33:22 Future Travel Plans and Business Insights

More about Stephanie

More on BYTE

Transcript

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 0:00

Welcome to another episode of The Wireless Way. I'm your host, Chris Whitaker, and yes, I'm grateful that you're here and equally grateful for Stephanie Hayes. she's the head of wireless expense analytics at Byte Analytics, and I met her, at Mobile Disrupt in Miami. Not that long ago, and we just hit it off. I mean, great energy. She's, as passionate about mobility and saving money as I am, and I talk a lot about that. If you've been listening, you know, I have other episodes on similar topics around managed mobility, mobile device management. You can't really have any kind of managed mobility conversation and not address the elephant in the room. Most people. In fact, all people are usually overpaying. All companies are usually overpaying, possibly even on your own personal account. If you have a family plan, you probably have some fees on there. You don't even know what they are. We're gonna dive into that, but before I bring her on just a little bit about her, uh, she leads the wireless expense optimization practice at Byte Analytics, a lean yet powerful firm that turns corporate wireless billing, chaos. It's a measurable savings. And again, if you're in business to make money, you gotta have your eye on this. You need, measurable savings. That's the buzzword that the secret sauce for proprietary global optimization algorithms. Mouthful there, but she's gonna tell us what that means. they go beyond line by line billing analysis, and that's how it used to always be done line by line. Some accounts payable person was just, grinding and out over definitely hours, if not days and weeks. So byte, considers the entire account ecosystem including shared services like data pools and Roman features, to identify cost effective configurations, that other providers often miss. Again, if you're doing it manually. Human nature is to make mistakes. So quite possibly, right? If you're not using some kind of software, you're probably make mistakes. under her leadership. Byte not only automates what used to take human analyst hours, but delivers results in just minutes with greater precision and a anonymizer tool to protect and use privacy. And, here's the best part, byte. Her company offers a zero risk demo. if they can't find savings, You pay nothing. so she's based in Northern Virginia, AKA Nova. I used to be a Nova resident myself in Fairfax County, Virginia, outside of Washington, DC a beautiful area, a beautiful state. she works directly with 10 providers and other managed service providers. she's on a mission to help organizations stop overpaying wireless carriers, optimize pool voice, data usage, and retrofit plan features after usage anomalies, to reduce future bills. Basically a mouthful there. Hey, you know, she's trying to remove the headaches and put the money back in your pocket, and you only really pay for what you're using. Is that about right? Stephanie? Welcome to the show.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 2:56

You got it, Chris. nailing it. Absolutely. I mean, it is a complicated little piece. this optimization and wireless expense management has many different components to it. procurement of phones, approving those orders, sending those orders through, getting the handset ready for the user. Those are all important, but those are not what I focus on. What we focus on at Bite Analytics, we just focus on optimization. And what does that mean? Really, it's the plans and the features.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 3:21

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 3:21

a really big family plan, right? Except instead of four people in your family, you have hundreds or thousands, and everyone is changing all the time. Trying to get that right can save money, but it's very difficult.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 3:31

Yeah. So, it is very difficult and I can't wait to get into that conversation a little bit more, but as always, customary, you know, first question on the show is what's not in the bio? How did you get here? Tell us a little bit more about who you are and your journey.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 3:48

Thank you. So, I'm originally from Canada. I'm, now married to an American, very proud, army spouse. I've traveled to 80 countries. I've lived in eight. I have a few times in my life moved to a new country where I didn't know anyone and didn't speak the language. So I like those little challenges. I also like scuba diving and riding my bicycle and yeah, generally living my best life.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 4:11

Got little challenges going to a country where you don't speak the language. That sounds like a pretty big challenge. man. Yeah, we could probably have the whole show just on that. That, that, that topic right there.'cause I know when I first met you, we were talking about that and, you know, we were just getting to know each other. And you told me that. I was like, oh my gosh. And I think I even asked you and I, I gotta ask you again, I mean, was there a favorite, and maybe that was, we could be positive, was, was there a favorite one that you would, that you would go if your, if your family goes, Hey, yeah, let's go anywhere in the world, where, where would you move to? Where would you go to and love?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 4:43

there's so many. I would say as far as hidden GS go, Slovenia in Europe is a wonderful country to visit. It's got all the good stuff about the Alps. it's much less expensive, beautiful cities, incredible caves that you can take a little train into,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 4:56

Hmm.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 4:56

I would say Eastern Europe. And Southeast Asia, it's very much a favorite for me.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 5:01

Wow.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 5:02

is my favorite country

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 5:03

Wow. Have you ever done a blog or documented or have you ever written anything on all of your travels? I mean, you should document that if you have it.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 5:11

That's a great question. when I travel, especially back in the day before social media, I would write long emails to my parents and then they would print them out and give them to my grandparents and my aunts and uncles, especially those who didn't have computers. So I did record it in that way. However, I'm not much of a travel blogger kind of person. I've been told a few times that I should keep a travel blog. I do have a bit of an Instagram, but it's not too glamorous.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 5:32

Okay, well, you're right. Some of the folks. I mean, I'm shocked. I talk to people that have never even left their hometown. I mean, they've never left their state. and I get it, you know, it's not for everybody, not, maybe you don't have the means or, but I, I imagine, did you have the ability to kind of travel, on a shoestring budget? I mean, were you kind of the master of making that dollar stretch and hostels and Airbnbs or, where they even call it couch surfing?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 6:00

Absolutely never did couch surfing.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 6:02

Good.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 6:02

backpacking trip through Asia was a long-term, you know, hostile type of situation. Lots of long, uncomfortable buses. minivans sketchy bathrooms, stuff like that. I wouldn't have it any other way. It's, for, seasoning you as a traveler and just also the local experiences. A lot of my travel lately has been because, before I started working on by analytics full-time. I was working as a wireless analyst full-time. That was a remote job, and so I could work in travel I was working in traveling, for years and years and that's how I, ended up being in Peru, Honduras, France and Croatia, where I eventually met my husband. So it's safe to say that. my remote travel job and also coming from a family of travelers led to this 80 country situation here.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 6:48

Wow, that's, I didn't even think of that. So a family or travelers, who are the other travelers in your family? your parents, siblings? All of them.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 6:56

All, all of them. Really? Yeah. So both of my, my parents have been on long backpacking trips before and after they got married. they still travel regularly, all the time, challenging travel, like to India and, you know, more outside the box. Places. And then my sister is, is very much a traveler. She did her, master's research over in Uganda and has, traveled to Southeast Asia, to Australia and New Zealand and many other places. So she's a, a diplomatic type. So she by

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 7:22

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 7:22

too.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 7:23

so all this travel, all this perspective you've gained, Take me back to the day, was it, just chance you got into mobility, expense management. At what point did you say, Hey, I'm gonna double down on this. When did that happen?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 7:37

That's a great question. So I started my career working for a big wireless carrier in the Rerate department. So when your bill went really, really sideways, there would be some math person behind the scenes who would go through and rebuild it all and then credit you, you know, so you weren't overpaying. That was me and then my colleagues behind the scenes. And then I got recruited over to a temp in 2011, and I immediately thought, oh, this is really interesting. You know, like. I've been looking at it from the other way, and now I'm looking at it from the customer's point of view. Look at how complicated this is. And this is fascinating too. And I had done some math in university and it was right around 20 11, 20 12, and I really started getting into this that I realized this is global optimization and I would like to talk about global optimization for just a moment here because it is so key to this. This, enterprise mobility piece, this concept of how people on the account are interdependent on each other. so you have, shared. plans. very common right now is if you have someone on a particular plan, it'll offer a discount to someone else on a different plan. And so you've got all these connections and dependencies. It's almost like a butterfly effect. If something changes on one side of the account, it can affect a user on the other side. And I really started to see this when I started doing manual optimization. back then it was all data pooling and so we would run into situations where, there would be one person who would spike up the data pool for everybody and then we would have to increase so many plans. And so you see how it's connected, and you need to find the lowest cost for everybody, for the whole account, not for each individual user. and so as I got further and further into this optimization and I analyzed bills from more and more countries, I started to see it's all the same game. They all create these incredibly interdependent things, and you need to look at all these connections. And I realized that the game was, that it was impossible for humans to manage the way that the carriers had structured this. It was just literally impossible for a human to get it right. And so it was going to, end up in their favor, like it always does with the wireless carriers. So it was that challenge of realizing that the deck was totally stacked against the customers that galvanized me to wanna do something about it. And that ended up being software.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 9:49

So would you call yourself a mathematician?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 9:51

I wouldn't call myself a mathematician. I did a unit on global optimization that was a couple weeks long. I remember getting through it and thinking, oh, I'm glad that's done. That was really hard. You know, we won't use that again.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:02

Yeah. So, yeah, tell us more about that. I mean, you know, that transition from manual telecom expense management, all the way to today, you know, leading by analytics and what inspired that shift to software based optimization then.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:17

So, I mean, it was seeing certain, you know, billing instances where someone's cost goes up incredibly and there's, you know, something that could have been done about it either before or just after the usage is incurred before the bill cycle. I'm gonna tell you a couple billing stories here just to sort

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:33

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:33

give you some of your listeners might be looking at this and thinking she has been looking at corporate wireless bill since 2008. crazy. Like, that must be so boring. what's really interesting

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:44

For some.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 10:45

Painful for some, some people I would never wanna do a job like that. But there's some really interesting things that happen.'cause it is all about human behavior. So take for example, a very sad story. We're not gonna be giving out any names and who among us has not had a couple of missteps in their romantic life, right? So there's no judgment here, but this is Chris from, I know you must remember before unlimited text was included for everybody. This was a Verizon account and you could either have 200 messages for free. this one month there was this poor gentleman who had a$975 texting bill, and he had had just a few messages per month before that, and then all of a sudden he had thousands and thousands of messages just from one month to the next. So let me ask you, Chris, what do you think could inspire a man to such foolishness?

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 13:10

Oh yeah. Was it have been a.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 13:14

He did. he met a woman that's exactly right. And things were, you know, very, they were very connected right off the bat. And that text messaging just went back and forth like never before. And then of course, he gets a big bill I let the manager know, and the manager goes to this poor gentleman and they say, oh, you know, we've noticed this. Should we add the unlimited feature for you? So not only was he very embarrassed but having to answer for this, but it turns out that he didn't need the feature added because he had already been dumped by the time that this conversation

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 13:46

Oh man.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 13:48

Into the next billing cycle. It was already too late to do anything about it. So, you know, those are the types of things that you wanna avoid and, and, you know, manage as much as possible. when you are in my position as a wireless analyst and you're looking at these massive volumes of billing data, you have thousands and thousands of lines on a particular account, that every usage event also has its own line on the billing file. Let's just talk, you know, long distance for a minute. You calling long distance to, you know, Vietnam. There's a different rate for this feature

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 14:18

It is usually international you're talking about right? International long distance.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 14:21

long distance. That's right. And same with roaming. You can have daily roaming, or you can have one of these a hundred dollars, you know, features that gives you a hundred minutes, let's say in a gigabyte of data. Or you can have, like a paper use roaming. Sometimes that's even, even cheaper. You need to, for every single line, every single month, make sure they're on the right plan. Make sure that they've got the right features and not all features are available with all plans. So sometimes you might wanna put someone onto a particular plan just to get the right feature for them. it becomes a mission impossible to get that right on every single line. And that's really what global optimization is. It's the perfect combination of plans and features and the way you do it. but no shortcuts. You calculate it all out. single possible combination of plans and features that can exist is calculated out. And that becomes billions and trillions and quadrillions, very, very quickly, even on small accounts just because of the nature of the exponential calculation. So we, have proprietary heuristics. It allows us to explore the mathematical problem space very quickly. So in about one second per line, this just runs in the background and we'll come up with this. Basically a list of exactly how to provision all of the lines, which plans and which features to minimize the account cost globally.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 15:41

Hmm.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 15:43

It was inspired by years and years and years of digging through these billing files and being haunted by the things that I was missing, and I didn't know what I was missing. Of course. Right? Because you don't know what you don't know, and that's very irritating when you're a perfectionist and an analyst and you feel passionately about solving this problem and you feel like little things are slipping past you,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 16:04

Well, and you're on the hook. I mean, that's your top, you got one job, right? and they're expecting you to find the answer, find the needle in the haystack. A few questions came up in my mind as you were talking. it almost seems like the carriers do this on purpose. I mean, I've talked to companies that have 75 phones. And their bill is 790 pages long. I mean,

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 16:23

Yeah.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 16:24

why does, why do you need 15 pages for one phone? It seems like, I mean, and of course you look at'em, it's, and a language you can't even hardly understand. I mean, it's like, try, you can't, it's like it's intentional. You can't really audit this easily. You really have to be an analyst. Well, and that has to be your full-time job. because you said you worked at a wireless carrier, do you think it's on purpose or is it just antiquated? Billing platforms that just can't summarize it better.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 16:50

I mean, I think it's, it's both. I definitely like, there's no doubt that the whole thing is stacked in the carrier's favor. So the way that they'll structure a plan that they offer a customer is it'll have, let's say a built-in roaming rate. Let's say you've got someone going to Canada, a.$2 per megabyte, which is an atrocious rate. You would never wanna pay that. But they're gonna build that into your plan, and then they're gonna give you a feature on top of that that will make, Canada roaming free, for example. but they won't automatically put that on every time you're gonna need to select it. And then if you don't select it and you get a big roaming bill, they're gonna say, oh, well you should have selected that feature. Right. So it always defaults to the most expensive carrier favored rate and option. It is never. in favor of the customer and it fails often. so I don't know if they built it that way or if it just happens to be that way. One thing I never do is put any blame on the call center reps, right? The ones that you talk to when you call in having been, you know, part of that world. everyone there is generally doing their best. So if there is any responsibility, it's further up the chain for sure.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 17:55

Right. Yeah, because I, I've talked to, to companies and they're like, oh, we have a great contract with, you know, fill in the blank, x, y, Z company. I'm like, well, I'm sure you do, but how are you physically managing it daily? You know, are you looking at what. Everybody's on a, a, unlimited plan, so we don't really worry about overages. I'm like, ouch. what percentage of your employees work out in the field? Oh, you know, we only have about 10% of our field technicians, but 90% work in the office. Oh. So they're on wifi all day. Wink, wink. I mean, see where we're going here. Why do you need unlimited data if they're on wifi all day and of course you do the analysis and you find the majority of them are two gigs a month, maybe. so they're overpaying. is that a kind of a common mistake you see as well? People being on, on a unlimited plan thinking they're saving money'cause they don't have the risk of the dreaded overage bill. Is there any other common missteps you see in that when you look at these accounts?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 18:47

Oh, Chris, I could take up the whole podcast talking about these little things, but yes, I'm

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 18:51

I.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 18:52

so all unlimited plans are not equal. There are much better and worse. Unlimited plans. There's different discounts that apply in fact and times these days on Verizon, if you're on an older unlimited plan, they'll put a rate plan or plan rate adjustment on there to just make it more expensive.'cause I want you to upgrade to their newer, more lucrative, I would presume, plans. There are? many plans, Unlimited plans. They'll include some daily roaming or they'll include some discount on another plan. And so if you're not leveraging that where it's gonna benefit your users, then you're leaving cost savings on the table. So set it and forget it. I would say it's never a viable strategy if you have a good contract with your carrier, that's. Great. It still requires management. and that doesn't necessarily have to be a huge task if you have good software or even if you do a little bit of manual optimization each month, I mean, you're gonna be light years ahead of the people who just never look.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 19:44

Wow. Where do you see all this going? I mean, you would think someone at the carriers would know that companies like yours exist or many others. There's a lot of manage mobility providers out there. I work with some of them on a daily basis. You would think they would see, okay, these companies are kind of cutting into our profit margin. in fact, maybe as a result of this, some of these customers may go, gosh, I've been. Getting gouged so bad here, I'm gonna change providers, it doesn't seem like it could be good. and then the other side of the coin is, you know, they could say, well guys, if they're coming in and they're cleaning up their bill, making the customer happy, maybe they'll stay with us longer. And it's now it's, they're not at risk anymore. where do you think they think this is going over the next three to five years and part one, part two. And how do you think AI is playing in it either today or in the future?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 20:32

Great questions. as far as ai, I'll go straight for that one. AI is, gonna become increasingly important, right? my. software by analytics incorporates some ai, I did look forward to the future and see my job as an analyst, this difficult portion of my job anyway, being automated by someone. And so, that was one of my motivating factors, to start automating it.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 20:58

Wow. So you, on your day-to-day efforts, you're working largely with TEMS and managed service providers. you're trying to help their offering, become more future proof, adding this AI or adding this, software analytics. what does an ideal, customer profile look like for you then, It's, the other Tims and managed service providers. do you see a lot of opportunity there? are we talking dozens or hundreds, or thousands of, businesses that could potentially take advantage of your solution?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 21:24

I would say yeah, definitely. thousands. So by is really designed for anyone who wants to optimize bills in a massive, massive volume. And that's why I'm not sort of focusing on end customers who have one bill to optimize. I wanna provide my services to them through my Tem and. Other partners. it's interesting what you said earlier about, the carriers should be aware that this is out there and how to deal with it. and there's a couple of interesting things there. the first is that, to my knowledge, bite Analytics is the first company that's really focused on just this global optimization piece. even Big Tens are still actually reliant mostly on human analysts. I think that's mostly a matter of economics because even big tems, this is a backend optimization piece. Tems are really good at frontend engineering and reports and things that allow them to interact with their customers. But this is, an entirely different kind of engineering. So they'd have to, do a different project with different engineers and it's a huge, risky, expensive project. And so it doesn't make sense for every 10 to do this on their own. And so that's why. My strategy of focus is to focus on this one little piece and then provide it to all 10 so they don't have to develop it themselves. They've got all the benefits of global optimization for their customers without the risk. Then as far as the carriers, I mean, that's really interesting what you say, because I agree, with both of your points,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 22:42

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 22:42

carriers, they kind of don't want this because they've got this optimization piece that is so lucrative, however. Almost always when I see a customer leave their carrier and go to another carrier, it's because of some sort of an instigating incident. And when it's about failing, it's normally some sort of a thing where it has built up. And if the carriers will just not let their customers get to that point, then they probably will never leave. So there is value to the carriers and providing some sort of an optimization service, just so that they don't have that sort of rage reaction. And then that departure that I see very often.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 23:17

Yeah, because I've even talked to, account payable folks and CFOs where they'll say, yeah, I spent$10 to get a dollar credit. what do you mean? Oh, well have my accounts payable rep on the phone for thirty, forty five minutes at a time just to be hung up on or transferred. The wrong department have to start all over and we're just chasing down a small credit for something that we caught.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 23:39

Yeah.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 23:39

Again, do a manual audit, which probably took hours if not days. And then you're on the phone trying to get hold of your account rep that's nuts. I thought, just recently I was working with, one of our, selling partners and the customer only had like 80 phones. The bill had gone from like, five grand to. Almost$10,000 and they haven't hired anyone else. they ended up noticing their bill. They were paying for like 125 lines with 80 employees.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 24:11

Yeah.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 24:12

And you know, part of it was not only, the carriers, Ease of doing business, not being there, but, the company was leaning heavily on mobility, but they didn't really have anyone internally to manage it. It was the HR department managing the cell phone bills, and that's not their sweet spot. I mean, they got bigger problems. They're dealing with onboarding, offboarding, HR policies and issues and performance plans. the HR directors like, Hey, look, I don't, I'm just doing this'cause you threw on my plate. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing really. Didn't have the right tools. yeah, we introduced them to a world expense management solution. And of course, right sized the bill, fixed all the glitches, gave them a nice portal, did onboarding, offboarding, you know, they were just blown away. And you kind of go, how the carriers created this problem, but how even the end users. Don't even know there's a better way. They don't know they have, they don't have to deal with this. They just think it's part of the, well, if we're gonna have cell phones, this is just how it is. No, it doesn't have to be that way. It's gonna be interesting to see when the next three to five years goes, either a companies like yours will continue to flourish and, solve the problems. Or b, will the carriers finally get a clue and say, you know what? We need to make this simple. You got a hundred phones. Here, maybe 10 pages with 10 lines per page with what you're paying for, what the features are. Instead of all these codes and all these, crazy string of numbers that mean nothing to nobody. That's something else. So, you know, as we kind of, we'll start to land the plane. We ain't gotta land it right away.'cause I do wanna know, what advice you have, for finance leaders. You know, with all your background, all your experience, you know, if they wanna avoid overpaying carriers, what advice should they, start doing today differently? what actions should they take?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 25:54

I think the best advice might be to pick a really good temp. These people are trained, this is all they do, right? Having someone go through your bill who,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 26:03

I.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 26:04

knows what they're doing versus someone who's trained in HR or, traditional accounting or something. there should be no doubt that it should save you money, and save you time. Working with a good 10, is a great idea. There are many tens out there. You should, find the one that works for you that's in the right price range and provides the right type of service. if you're not gonna hire a 10, at the very least. download your text formatted bill from the carrier website and take the total charges start by descending and take the top 15 or so and look at them. And if it's an equipment charge and you know that person got a phone, then that's fine. But if you see a big roaming charge or something else, even if you do nothing else. it to your account rep and they might have some suggestions, at least they will know then that you're looking at the bill and they might have some helpful suggestions to offer. so yeah, I would say get someone to, you know, outsource it to people who can really

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:02

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:03

If you're not gonna do that, then at least give it a cursory look and make your account rep know that you kind of care and that you're looking at it.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:09

Do you think if you call the account rep and say, Hey, I only have 80 employees. Why do I have 125 phones? You think they would help them go, okay, well let's take a look at that. These phones haven't been used in three, four, five months. Let's just go ahead and disconnect those. Well, they do that if you ask'em, you think, or that's kind of like, well, you need to log in the portal and do it yourself.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:29

they would probably help. I mean, it depends on the rep, right?

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:31

Yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:31

with every rep of every flavor. always try to bear in mind whether I'm dealing with a billing rep or like a sales rep, because the, the sort of skill

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:40

Oh yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:41

and their focus is entirely different.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:42

And how they're compensated, varies.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 27:44

That's exactly right. So I was about to say, you know, when you are dealing with a sales rep most of the time, I know, and this, this could be different, especially'cause I'm talking about my carrier experience from years and years ago, but it was, it was not that devastating to lose a few lines. The carrier reps are absolutely incentivized to activate new units. I think if you got the right rep, I don't think they're incentivized against doing that for you. I also think they probably will turn around and try to convince you to try to activate some new lines, towards the end of their next quarter.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 28:17

How about insurance? what's your opinion on insurance? You know, some people are paying$15 a phone a month.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 28:23

That's a great question. Yeah, so anytime I see an insurance feature on Verizon or at and t or whatever, I just recommend that they remove it. Most of the time people are not using them, they're not getting the value from them. If they do have a broken device, they're not even sort of pushed through that workflow that they should be pushed through. There are new approaches to device insurance that I think are much more customer friendly, that I think are of more value. So I will reserve my judgment, because I think insurance can be good, but I think the way that the carriers give you these insurance features is not cost effective.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 28:57

Yeah, so just to put that perspective, a hundred, if you, if you're a company, let's just say hypothetically of a hundred phones at$15 a phone, you know,$1,500 a month, it's$18,000 a year.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:10

Yeah.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:11

mean, you could afford to buy every employee a brand new device, the latest and greatest two phones maybe every year. so clearly it is cheaper to not have the insurance. And that's gotta be just a huge profit center for the carriers too. It just,

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:24

Absolutely.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:24

you know, if you only have four phones and, you have a history of losing phones, breaking phones, I don't know. But yeah, we're talking about bigger companies here, that, that's not, that's not the case.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:34

And it's response, right? What about if you break your phone? And it's the same thing with unlimited plans. So you know, you've got three different kinds of unlimited plans, but this unlimited is the most unlimited. And so I don't. I don't know if I wanna risk having a lesser unlimited plan, so I'm gonna put it on the most expensive one. And that is where they make all of their money. And that's where I try to talk my customers back from the edge, right? If you don't need it, don't pay for it. We can always increase it later. Goldilocks approach,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:59

Yes.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 29:59

Everyone has what they need, no more, no less. And it changes from month to month, even within the month.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:04

Keep it What?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:06

boo.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:06

Tickety boo.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:08

I don't think it's a technical term, but it's, you know, when you think about everything being imperfect, harmony. So I think I told you in Miami, when I think of these optimizations, I see a curve. I see a curve, and it comes down. And at the very bottom is that global optimization, that point that we're going for. And every change that we make gets us closer to that. and it's a moving target, but it's a worthwhile target because when you hit it, you are. Not overpaying the wireless carrier. and when you're doing global optimization, just by its very nature, it's automated. a human cannot do global optimization. So you're saving

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:40

Hmm.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:40

too.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 30:41

Yep. You know, another thing I was thinking of, overspending. I see a lot of companies are being charged for that mobile device management software. And then you say, oh, I see you have an MDM on all your, your 5,000 phones. Who's managing that? Oh, the carrier is, oh really? Do they enforce, compliance? Are they making sure it's on all your phones? Are they addressing all the alerts? Are you getting reports for them? What are you talking about? They have no idea. They just think'cause they're paying for that, but someone's gotta manage it. Someone has to, you know, create their policies and the groups and that in itself is a whole other conversation. You know, that's another hour conversation we can have on MDMs. so yeah, if you're paying for an MDM and, and, and you can't answer the question that you know, who has the portal access? my favorite is, oh, well, John set that up four years ago, but he's been gone for a year. No one's even logged into it, but we've been paying for it.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 31:33

Yeah.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 31:34

Does that make sense? Well, I tell you, if you're listening and, this is a new topic to you, I hope we made the case, that, wireless expense management is important. And there are a lot of companies that can do it. and just because you have the title TEM right, doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it the best way. If you're doing it, ask'em how are you doing this calculations manually? Or do you have any kind of software? And obviously we know even if you're tech enthusiast or not. I believe technology makes less mistakes than humans. I think we can all agree on that. It's like you think about how many mistakes I've made in this episode of data tongue tied or whatever, technology. It does what it's programmed and it does what it's configured for. And, I mean, yeah, usually when technology fells this was caused somewhere there's a human error involved, most likely is my opinion.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 32:19

Agree.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 32:20

So as, let's wrap it up. I mean, again, I think we could go on and on, definitely check the show notes. I'll have information of how to get ahold of bite analytics and of course Stephanie, any last words, anything we haven't covered that you want to hit on or anything you wanna leave us with?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 32:36

first, thank you so much for having me, Chris. This is a wonderful experience. I'm gonna leave you with my favorite billing story of all time. It is, a Classic story, again, withholding names for privacy. But it was, during the 2010 Olympics, I was still working for a wireless carrier, who was a sponsor of the Olympics. someone came to me and Presented me with a$275,000 phone bill just on one line for this, this one month. looked into it and I, I saw it was all valid usage. It was building at 51 20 per megabyte. It was out of bundle roaming in Mexico. I looked carefully at the timing where it was incurred, and I knew right away what had happened. And what had happened is that someone had streamed the gold medal hockey game in high definition for all of their friends because the resort's wifi was 20 bucks a day and they didn't wanna pay it. So they figured they just put it on their employer's air card. And I mean, it was a great outcome to the game, for this particular hockey fan. However, you know, the fallout from that was significant and robust and they, they did end up rerating it, because it was such a devastating charge. But, you know, it's just one of those things that sort of brings wireless expense management with the real world, with the sporting world, right? All of this stuff, affects each other.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 33:52

Absolutely.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 33:52

that's why I find it interesting and fun.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 33:54

That is, I have two comments, before we wrap though. first I think it's why MDM and WEM or TEM are so related because now with a proper MDM strategy, a corporate owned device, you can block streaming video, for example, or only allow certain URLs and you control what that device can be used for. It's a work phone, it's a work device. It's not meant for your. Your private use. so yeah, I think a proper Tim or WIM strategy will find enough savings to pay for more than pay for that MDM solution. they go hand in hand to me. They're both non-negotiables. it's irresponsible to just pay where the bill says, and it's also irresponsible to just give your employee, 800 or, you know,$1,200 device and say, Hey. good luck with this, use it for work and they use it for their kids watching, cartoon Network or Netflix, on family vacations. So anyway, I get off my pedestal on that one because I get hot on that too. I don't know why I'm so passionate about this stuff, but, it's just crazy. That's what it is. It's crazy.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 34:53

It's crazy.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 34:54

Well, okay, so my last question for you that, again, it popped up in my head as you're talking. So we, we started off the show talking about your 80 countries. I mean, have you hung up your suitcase for now? I mean, do you have any more trips planned for the future? Are you, did you put that on, on, are you on a travel hiatus for now? What's your future travel plans?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 35:12

bit of a travel hiatus for now. I'm really focusing on Bite. I've had this in my mind for so many years, and then, you know, development took years and now it's really the time to go out and market it. However, I do have a two week. Maybe 10 day trip to Portugal, I think this fall, and probably head somewhere next spring. So I would say, unlike my previous times when I'm sort of living for months or years abroad, I go for two weeks, you know, just like anybody else. So I still love it, but it's,

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 35:41

Just like anybody else, I dunno about that. The average person does not take two weeks. I wish we did. We should. That's what many of my, European friends, especially in France and Spain, I mean, yeah, they take the whole month of August off of course. I mean, you take more than a week off, people are like. Are you crazy? You know, they're gonna fire you. Like they better or not, they gave, they gave me two weeks of vacation. I can't use them yet, I started to see a little bit of a trend. People are starting to take advantage of their full time off. In fact, you see some companies with unlimited PTO, they lot, those companies starting to rethink that. They're like, wait a minute, these, these young people are coming in. They're taking a four day weekend, twice a month. It's like, that's not what we had in mind. We still need you to be at work. Wow.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:24

I'm pretty sure I'll be working on my two weeks in October. But you know what I love by so much. I love this global optimization so much. If you hours of work on a vacation doesn't really feel like work.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:34

That's right. how did you come up with that business name, BYTE, right?

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:38

great question. I also like the idea of biting chunks out of the

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:42

Oh, yeah.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:42

I like the idea of a little, a little critter, like a Tasmanian double with big teeth that just goes through your bill and tears it into a million pieces and finds every little bit of savings that's gonna leak out.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:53

Taking a bite outta

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:54

through that bill.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 36:55

instead, a bite outta your bill. Have you? You should come up with a little mascot. You should come up with a little like a Pac Man.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 37:01

I should.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 37:03

Bill. Oh my God. Well, Stephanie, I've thoroughly enjoyed this. what a great conversation. again, if you're listening and we haven't made a point, you need to go back and re-listen or read the transcript or something. so again, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it.

stephanie-heys_1_08-05-2025_115952: 37:15

Thank you, Chris.

chris_1_08-05-2025_115952: 37:17

Yes. And there you go folks, as you were listening to this episode, as always, if a customer popped in your mind or a colleague or a coworker or a friend that you were having this conversation with, let me share this episode with them. Really appreciate it. You can always go to the wireless way.net at the, contact us button. Any feedback on this episode or others. Love to hear from you. And, until then, we'll see you next time on the Wireless Way.