25 Years strong Auditel Telecom Refunds and TEM bring $125 Million

Auditel Inc. of Florida, an auditing telecommunication company, celebrates 25 years in business. Barbara Clements founded Auditel in February of 1993. “I’m often asked how Auditel started and changed over the years.”

In the early 90’s, I was in the long-distance business, and one of our clients was Gooding’s Supermarkets, a Florida-based grocery store chain. While reviewing their telecom bills, I noticed they weren’t billed usages for 30 phone lines. The telecom vendor thought the phone lines were in use, but I could find none of the normal usages on any bills for the past 10 years, so I requested a site visit.

The Service Provider and the vendor spent the entire day trying to locate the 30 lines. Turns out theses were PBX lines that had never been delivered to the site. The next surprise was that they had been billing for the past 10 years!  We obtained a refund back to the service established date, plus interest. It was a sizable refund, and I knew right then that I was on to something. I started Auditel and haven’t looked back.

Gooding’s hired Auditel to oversee their telecom department, and the bank branches inside the supermarkets used our telecom audit services as well and the journey began.  I grew my team as I had a heart for finding mistakes in the phone and data billings. Turned out there were a lot of errors in our client’s bills.  The news traveled quickly and we began getting requests for telecom audits for clients like Florida Hospital, Rotech Medical, Sears Pest Control, Airgas, 1st National Bank, Rent a Center,  the Orlando Sentinel, Pier 1 Imports, among others. It was truly amazing to be working with Fortune 500 Companies in our first years of business.

As we expanded, I developed a telecom training curriculum that brought in IT managers, telecom managers, telecom service technicians, telecom analysts, and accounts payable for workshop training. The telecom expense management workshop provided the tools and process needed to analyze Service Providers taxes, surcharges, fees, contracts, and USOC codes. With our GSA schedule we trained several divisions of the U.S. Marines, and The National Weather Service. Then large corporations came for training like GMAC Insurance, Southern Company, RentWay, EchoStar (now Dish Networks) and many more of our clients that can’t be named due to confidentiality and NDA.  

We recently performed telecom expense management services for a client with a current TEM provider. After two other firms independently conducted the telecom audit they couldn’t find any telecom refunds or savings.  The client asked Auditel to perform the same audit, within 3 weeks we delivered findings of over $350K in refunds plus monthly savings, with no change of Service Provider, and no upfront costs. Auditel contingency TEM services delivered unbiased results along with hefty telecom refunds.

What started out as a question about a Gooding’s phone bill ended up starting the foundations of Auditel. Now thanks to our clients, for over 25 years now we’ve delivered telecom audits, inventory management, telecom training with templates and tool for success. We plan to continue to provide excellent service and contingency based telecom expense management.”