The goal of making it simple and easy for your customers and clients to do business with you begins with focused, rehearsed, and perfected behind-the-scenes work to achieve consistency.

Give your customers consistency, and you'll solidify loyalty. If you embellish with a few magic words and a prop or two, that's great - but if you aren't consistent, your audience (customers) won't be loyal enough to keep paying entry fee to see your show, or buy your products and services.

Many of us focus on props - promotions, signage, advertising - yes, these things are extremely important to attract people to your services and products. But if you are not delivering consistency to your customers and clients who are attracted to your props, they will not come back for more.

Roughly 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. That's right, long-term success is in repeat business, not in pulling in new customers with gags and gimmicks only to have them leave after first show.

Build consistency into your business by remembering magician. An audience may be dazzled by words, hats, and capes, but if tiger doesn't disappear every single time, that audience won't likely come back to see a second show.

Directory assistance call completion, repeat dial and call return are nice and convenient for employees - but they will cost your company over time. These features can and should be blocked through your carrier immediately. If any of these features are needed, contact your LEC and ask if a monthly fee be paid for unlimited usage.

5) Review summary section of your bills every month.

Nothing can take place of a well-designed and systematic telecom audit of your entire telecom department. However, a quick monthly scan of summary section of your local telephone bills will sometimes turn up "golden nuggets" of savings.

Common problems include: more than one long distance carrier included (slamming), bogus Internet charges (cramming) from companies other than your ISP, and directory listings that are not listed. These charges can run as high as $29.95.

To maximize savings, review each bill every month. Bogus charges will continue month after month until they are removed. And don't be surprised if they magically appear again in 2-3 months time after they are removed from a bill.

6) Consider upgrading to a T1 if you have more than 20 lines.

For smaller businesses, installing a T1 line into your PBX system can reduce your local telephone charges. A T1 can be cost-effective because it combines many outgoing lines into a single digital line that runs from your office to LEC central office. The T1 can replace up to 24 POTS lines in your PBX. No one will notice a difference except maybe person who pays bills. In addition, a T1 can carry data as well.

7) Gather customer service records (CSRs) from your LEC for more detailed local service analysis.

A great deal of information can be found on CSRs that are not contained on your monthly billing statement. They are an invaluable resource when attempting to identify unneeded services and unused lines. CSRs reveal quantity and types of lines, their PICs, service elements, hunting arrangements, wire maintenance, circuit termination locations, directory listings, and a host of other esoteric information.

Obtaining your CSRs from LEC can be a painful and time-consuming process, but effort is worth it in savings and credits that are eventually rendered. Some LECs will charge a fee issuing CSRs, but with some persistence, you may be able to get this fee waived.

8) Consider engaging a telecom consultant for telecom auditing, bill management or telemanagement services.

Time is money. If your staff is not prepared to consistently implement above tasks, consider engaging a professional telecom consulting firm to handle them for you. Ideally, a telecom audit done first will turn up many areas for potential cost-savings. Then a monthly bill management program will keep bills clean and free from those pesky recurring errors.

At TelCon Associates, we have structured our consulting services for maximum savings to client with no risk. We place our emphasis on details, timeliness and a high level personal service for our clients.

The Truth About Telecom Outsourcing and How To Select a Telecom Consultant will give you more specific information regarding this subject. The Telecom Cost-Cutting Reference Manual is an excellent resource for those that would rather do it themselves.

So get to work on reducing those local phone bills. You will be glad you did.