Tablets and smartphones can be huge assets to your business. Not only do they allow your employees to conduct work on-the-go, but they also significantly reduce administrative costs, increase productivity, and improve customer satisfaction. However, when employees get carried away with their data usage, these devices can end up being pretty costly. You may not want to pay for larger data plan, and no one wants to pay those awful overage fees charged by the wireless carriers.
Are your employees using too much data?
If so, don’t worry! There are numerous actions you can take to curb excessive data usage by your employees. Here are 6 helpful tips for curbing business data usage.
1. Adjust your employees’ WiFi settings
Some devices’ default settings require you to manually select WiFi networks when you are in range in order to connect. This means that if your employees forget to connect to WiFi when they are in the office or at home, they’re using unnecessarily large amounts of data.
Before giving tablets or smartphones to your employees, adjust the WiFi settings on each device so that they automatically connect to WiFi networks when they are in range. This means that whether you workers are in the office, at home, or in the airport waiting for a flight, they’ll always be prompted to connect to nearby WiFi networks.
2. Only download large files when connected to WiFi
Digital downloads use a ton of data. If your employees need to download files for work quite often, instruct them to only download files on WiFi if possible. A few small PDFs here and there won’t hurt your data usage a whole lot, but for anything larger than 100 MB, your employees should really use WiFi.
3. Manage your employees’ notifications
If you are a tablet or smartphone user, you know how many notifications you get on a daily basis. While these notifications don’t use up a ton of data, they really do add up, and every bit of data counts, right?
While it’s sometimes important for your employees to have notifications enabled, they’re not always vital. Have your employees disable email and push notifications when they’re not working or on vacation to eliminate any unnecessary data usage. Also, notifications for entertainment or personal apps like Angry Birds or Facebook should always be disabled.
4. Tell your employees to close their apps
Let me paint a picture for you: your top salesman just had an important meeting with a client. In order to get to their client’s office, they used the GPS app on their company tablet. After arriving to their destination, they put the tablet in lock mode, but didn’t close out of their GPS app.
Did you know that apps left running in the background continue to use up your company’s data? Make sure that your employees always close out of every app that they use, especially apps that utilize location services–these apps continue to send and receive data even when the device is in lock mode.
5. Cut out those pesky entertainment sites
Entertainment sites and apps like Netflix and Hulu can also really do a number on your company’s data usage. For instance, movies streamed over Netflix can use up to 900 megabytes–that’s almost an entire gigabyte!
Monitor and control the data usage of your employees so that they don’t use up your company’s data plan on these non-business sites. Data providers like DataXoom have systems in place that allow you to monitor how your employees are using company data, so you can cut out those data-hungry entertainment sites.
6. Set up usage alerts
With harsh deadlines and constant meetings, frequently checking on your company’s data usage is probably at the bottom of your list of priorities. Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone frequently updated you on the status of your company’s data usage?
Some data providers, including DataXoom, allow you to set up usage alert systems. These systems alert you when you’ve reached 50%, 75%, and 90% of your allotted data amount. That way you’ll know when your company has almost reached its data cap. If you’ve almost reached your cap, simply purchase more data–you’ll never pay another annoying overage fee.
Still worried about the data usage of your employees?
In addition to data usage alerts and monitoring of your employees’ data usage, DataXoom also allows you to set hard caps on the amount of data your employees can use, so they will never use too much data, and you’ll never pay another overage fee in your life. Interested in what DataXoom can offer your business? Give us a call or drop us a note today!
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