For starters, stop obsessing about how the technology processes your calls. New technologies come and go, but when shopping for phone calls you need only consider three things, in this order:

1. How well and how often will my calls go through (reliability)?
2. How well will they sound (quality)?
3. How much will they cost compared to competitors (value)?

If SBC or Verizon starts to offer long distance to China for a penny a minute with guaranteed quality, and you call China a lot, why care about how the call gets there? Does it matter?

SBC has not yet made that penny a minute offer for calls to China, but there are many upstarts who are dirt cheap. Before you place your bet on the new and untried, check to see:

1. How quickly do they answer the phone when you call for help?
2. How much does the guy or gal who answers the phone know about solving business problems?
3. How often does the service go out, or get slow, or get lousy?
4. How long does it usually take to get better?

Keep in mind that not all calls need to be the same quality. You can mix and match vendors for different tasks. For instance, if you make lots of calls between your accounting department and your factory in Taiwan, low cost internet calls with cell phone quality may be more than adequate. For selling your best customers, you may wish to pay more for calls to sound better.

Here's a great cost cutter to try. Log on to Skype.com and call your Taiwan factory, or anyone in the world with a computer, for free. Also, call anyone with a regular phone for next to nothing. Call from your phone, your computer, your PocketPC, whatever. Call any phone in the US or Western Europe for a little more than 2 cents a minute. China is 3 cents a minute.

If you do a lot of international calling, this is a great way to cut costs right to the bottom line. Who says the US Dollar still can't get you a good deal overseas?

It used to be that when somebody made a mistake they would say "Oops, that's why they put erasers on pencils." That old saw seems to have lost it's punch. Anybody seen a pencil lately? The pencils may have given way to keyboards (and erasers to delete keys), but errors still abound and the failure to track and correct them can cost you plenty.

Consider that in a recent issue of CFO-IT Magazine, Gartner analyst Eric Goodness is quoted as saying that 12 to 20% of telephone charges are wrong and 85% of those mistakes are in the carrier's favor. That means that you have almost a one in five chance that you are paying a hidden tax to the phone company that you don't owe.

I read about such things, because I spend a lot of time reviewing phone bills, but what makes us think that only the phone company is so sloppy? How about the electric company, the office supply company, the product wholesalers, the bank, the insurance company, the state unemployment division, the sales tax department?

I remember getting refund check from Ma Bell for upwards of six figures. Suddenly, one day I woke up to the realization that, hey, everybody draws from the same labor pool, so they all must be making mistakes, too.

Ya think?

So, if competition keeps you from raising your prices and you's still like to improve margins, take another look at your costs and see if that bill doesn't have a little extra thrown in for good measure.