Case Studies
August 2008
This is a case study on a typical Prosumer's needs to better manage their mobile telecom expenses. Click here for 
PDF version (1.84 MB).
THE PROSUMER
Brian Pleet is the classic business professional, or "prosumer". He runs a small Canadian business called the Strategico Marketing Group. Strategico helps executives improve their sales and marketing effectiveness in organizations ranging from Fortune 100 to entrepreneurial start-ups. As with most busy professionals, Brian travels extensively and depends on his mobile phone for voice calls, emails, SMS, applications, navigation, and many other typical functions that a Smartphone provides. His monthly mobile phone bill is frequently several hundreds of dollars. As a highly paid executive consultant, Brian is dependent on billing for his time and his expenses. Even when not billing his clients, Brian must co-ordinate the services of the members of the Strategico team and maintain accurate timekeeping records for internal management and auditing purposes.
Brian's mobile phone requirements are similar to many "prosumers" so Redwood asked Brian to participate in a trial of the new momentem™ service to see whether it could help him to manage his busy mobile life.
THE momentem™ SOLUTION
momentem™ Mobile Telecom Expense Management (MTEM) from Redwood Technologies is a combination of downloadable software for Smartphones and a managed service operating on the wireless carrier's network. It's a simple, yet addictive, cell phone expense management tool to empower Prosumers using intelligent wireless devices to manage their wireless activities by "tagging" them directly from the handset. Each tagged wireless activity gets associated with specific client or employer contacts and projects, and generates notes, action items, and disposition information.
TAGGING WITHIN MINUTES
Brian was up and running within minutes of downloading momentem™ to his Smartphone as there was no need for any complicated registration or integration with his phone or PC. Early in the trial Brian immediately discovered that he could tag and allocate all of his mobile calls and emails to his clients and projects. This enabled his assistant to use momentem™ reports to analyze time spent on each project, ideal for any business trying to manage multiple projects. As a side benefit she was able to produce audit trails to show the tax authorities that the phone was being used for business. It also enabled her to make more sense of Brian's mobile phone bill when it arrived. Brian commented: "instead of the well-intentioned but irritating ‘what was that expensive call all about', we were able to simply look it up and associate it with the client and reason for the call."
However the real benefit of tagging calls was discovered when Brian billed for his time and the cost of calls. During the tagging process Brian could easily flag time spent on a particular call or email as billable, and/or the cost of the call as being an expense item. When it came time to generate monthly invoices, momentem™ produced a spreadsheet with everything neatly sorted and flagged accordingly. Brian added, "No more manually trying to guess what particular calls on the bill were about or trying to remember what time was spent on a client's account, momentem™ captured it all in one place."
COMPLETE ACTIVITY & MOBILE EXPENSE MANAGEMENT momentem™ also allowed Brian to input expense items, face-to-face meetings, and time spent at his desk doing emails and reports from his PC. All of these non-phone activities were tagged using the same client and project names, and appeared in the same momentem™ report. momentem™ became Brian's main repository for all activities. "momentem™ was so easy to use," said Brian. "After a call or time spent on an email, it required a couple of key clicks to tag the event. Logging an expense or a meeting was very intuitive and convenient. momentem™ has a ‘click and forget' approach where you only have to tag it and the software does the rest. momentem™ is far easier to use than any other tracking system and it's all done from my always-on mobile device, not my PC."
Brian has always been an avid user of different contact management applications. In fact he was once featured as a case study for Maximizer, for his 20 years of capturing contact related information. With momentem™ he was able to capture his contact notes at the end of each call, and those notes were appended to the tagged call record. Brian's clients were impressed that he was using a professional tool to accurately and quickly report his efforts on their account. In particular, Brian enjoyed the on-handset reporting function. He explained: "You can use the handset at any time to request an activity report for any given period, broken down by client, project, calls, emails, etc. Just before a client meeting, I'd request and review, on the phone's screen, how much time I'd spent on their account since the last meeting. My clients were blown away with the level of detail and ease of use."
ACCURATE TIME TRACKING Brian, as with most professionals, also realized how easily he sometimes underestimates the time he spends on projects. He noted "momentem™ showed me very accurately where I was spending my time. Clients have increasingly asked me to work on projects on a flat rate so I don't bill for each hour. For those types of projects, momentem™ gave me the ammunition to demonstrate how much time I'd invested and quite often it was well over the budget we had previously agreed upon. You could call it a selling tool, to show clients what value I was adding to their business. I could even explain the specifics because I often tagged each sub-project and added useful notes." Brian then added "I was staggered how much time I spent reading and replying to emails on my mobile phone. Those ‘1 and 2 minute' emails added up to over several hours at the end of the month, and at my hourly rate that's not a small amount of money. Until I used momentem™ I'd never been able to monetize that extra time and effort required to meet my clients' needs."
As the busy professional who bills his time to clients, Brian was able to use momentem™'s on-handset reporting to accurately track all of his billable hours for the month. "All prosumers need to have a handle on where their revenue is coming from and connect that to where they are spending their time. momentem™ gave me instant visibility to my running total, available during any down-time with no need to use a PC. momentem™ even pre-calculated my billable time based on my hourly rate. That kind of data is vital to anyone running a business, especially a services business."
KEEPING TRACK OF ROAMING CALLS
During the momentem™ trial, Brian headed to the United States to deliver coaching and development sessions for a major client. Before leaving Canada he purchased 4 hours of airtime from his wireless provider. By tagging his roaming calls he kept accurate track of how many minutes he had spent on calls. He recalls "At any time I was able to query momentem™ to find out how many minutes I had used. I was worried about going over my roaming allowance and being billed $1 per minute. There's no other easy way of keeping count of your calls, so for anyone who roams momentem™ is indispensable." Brian also made some calls that weren't in that bundle, which he flagged as being billable to his clients. When the bill arrived, Brian was able to apportion the bill and directly recover the cost of expensive calls and account for them in his accounting system.
INSTANT CAPTURING
Brian also found the instant reminder feature invaluable while travelling and receiving lots of sales-related calls. He added, "Normally, when you're on the move, for example in an airport, you have no easy way of capturing the information. What I loved about momentem™ was that it grabbed the caller's name and number. I only typed summary notes on my Smartphone and everything was immediately and permanently available in an email which I could act on when I arrived at my destination." He went on to illustrate his point, "I was negotiating contract terms over the phone. At the end of the call I captured the summary, copied it to the other party for a clear understanding on what we'd agreed and received an audit trail within momentem™, as an email."
THE APPEAL TO WIRELESS CARRIERS
Brian believes that momentem™ will not only appeal to users, but also to wireless carriers. He explained. "During the trial period I increased my use of mobile vs. landline telephone. Landlines have been around a hundred years but it was easier to capture and log my activity when it came through the mobile phone. Likewise with emails, I began using my Smartphone to send emails because it tracked the time spent on them. Carriers will really like that!"
EASE OF USE
What Brian liked the most was the simplicity. "I've been an early adopter of technology all of my life, usually paying the price of being on the ‘bleeding' edge. Conversely, momentem™ was easy to install, intuitive to use, quick to tag everything and the reports are simple and clear. With momentem™, there was no premium I paid for being on the bleeding edge - it actually reduced my operating complexity."
RETURN ON INVESTMENT (R.O.I.)
With any innovation for a businessperson there must be a "R.O.I." Brian was asked how he could quantify the value of momentem™ in his business. He started by explaining the intangible benefits. "momentem™ shows my clients that I have my act together because I accurately track my engagements and deliver on commitments made…ultimately helping justify a higher billing rate. It also reduces the administrative burden and increases my assistant's job satisfaction because it's easier to make more sense of my phone bill, less time consuming to invoice my clients, and easier to track my business productivity."
He went on to explain the tangible financial benefits of momentem™. "The monthly fee was easily justified in a several distinct ways; I was able to find more billable time and recover the cost of expensive calls that I would not have otherwise remembered. I was able to manage my cellular usage to keep within my rate plan. And although my mobile phone usage increased, I was able to apportion more of my bill to various clients and projects. And if the tax authorities decide to audit me, I can prove that my phone is used for business because I have a full audit trail, and that could save me a lot of money!"
Brian Pleet is a typical business professional. He cares passionately about his client relationships and how he interacts with them. momentem™ added real value in that area. He also cares about his bottom line while growing his successful business and maintaining a tight grip on costs and productivity. momentem™ empowered him to increase his bottom line by leveraging his existing mobile phone, even if it increased his wireless charges. For any road warrior like Brian, momentem™ immediately delivers both!
ABOUT REDWOOD TECHNOLOGIES
Redwood Technologies focuses on developing innovative wireless software products and services for business professional users of smart phones such as BlackBerrys. Redwood is one of the Hottest 20 Innovative Companies in Canada noted by the Canadian Innovation Exchange, was Company of the Year at the Banff Venture Forum 2007, and was shortlisted globally as True Mobile Start-Up 2008 by the GSM Association.
For more information on momentem™ please visit www.momentem.net
For more information on Redwood please visit www.redwoodtechnologies.com
