“The whole idea of Telecom Expense Management is to help a company keep better control of its telecom costs by systematically checking for billing errors and finding opportunities to obtain better pricing by choosing the optimal plans and consolidating services,” says Joan Engebretson on Connected Planet (News - Alert).

And if you’re on her wavelength, you think that hiring a telco to do that “would be like paying the fox to watch the hen house.” Great work for the fox when he can get it.

Engebretson is casting a colder eye on Vodafone (News - Alert) Global Services’ announcement earlier this month that it had acquired two telecom expense management companies, noting rather drily that “it may have seemed an unlikely area for a telco to venture into.”

But hey, what do we know: “Business customers apparently don’t see it that way. AOTMP, a company that consults with companies about TEM, recently conducted research aimed at determining what business customers thought of different TEM software packages. Respondents were asked to provide the name of their TEM supplier and interestingly, some of them named their telco rather than the company that provides their TEM software,” Engebretson writes, no doubt shaking her head in wonder.

A growing number of companies, the AOTMP study found, “are using carrier billing platforms as a primary TEM tool to gain visibility into telecom usage and spend.”

In fact, as she notes, “a number of service providers have added TEM to the portfolio of services they offer enterprise customers,” citing AOTMP Vice President of Global Performance Management Timothy C. Colwell. Paetec, Colwell says, “has been particularly active in this area, adding that the carrier received an average customer satisfaction ranking of 8.04 on a scale of 1 to 10.”

As for the trust issue, Colwell told Engebretson if companies are just looking to find billing errors, “they probably wouldn’t select a carrier as their supplier. But typically the focus of TEM practices is broader—and trust apparently isn’t a major concern.”