Fuze are a company that focus heavily on the world of enterprise global voice, video, messaging, and collaboration. Basically, they deliver everything that an enterprise company might need into a single platform. At UC EXPO 2017, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak to the Vice President of the EMEA team for Fuze, Kris Wood, who was one of the people who originally helped to take Fuze into a global market.
Learning about Fuze
At the start of my conversation with Kris, I was interested to hear more about his position in the company, and how the brand has developed over the years. He informed me that although Fuze was founded back in 2006, from day one the vision was to serve the mid-market and enterprise sectors.
Back when Fuze began, there was a lot of momentum around providers in the SME space, but they built the platform to approach the enterprise, and started selling in 2007 from America, to various organisations in locations around the world. In 2013, the company decided to scale out the business to the Global market.
To win over the enterprise market, Fuze knew that they needed to address the direct sales model. The direct sales solution gave them predictability and room to scale. Since the beginning of their business, they’ve been scaling out direct sales, going from 25 sales people, to 100. Now, they’re looking for new ways to scale into mature markets, building in the service provider and reseller spaces so that they can develop and grow.
Serving New Markets
Considering the future, Wood told me: “We see a great opportunity for the channel to serve markets where we don’t have direct sales, and scale the markets where we do.” In other words, Fuze will be focusing on direct and indirect sales on a global scale.
Right now, they have two sales teams – one that looks at businesses with about 100-500 seats, known as the “business development management team“, and another that focuses on businesses with anywhere between 500 and 10,000 seats. “We think that around 2,500 to 5,000 seats is a really good market for us. Of course, we’ve worked with people with less and more seats than that.”
I was interested to hear how, in a very crowded market for /unified-communications/ucaas and cloud communications, Fuze would be differentiating themselves from the crowd.
“I think there are a number of areas. The first is in the fact that we offer a truly unified & global experience for end users. For instance, someone can start a conversation through text, then escalate that to voice and video, without asking someone to download any extra software. This functionality is a unique solution for us to give to people.”
One of the biggest problems with UC is that the functionality and applications have always been there, but the back-end was a mess to use. Fuze work by cleaning up that back-end and making it more unified, to deliver a comprehensive cloud experience.
Delivering a Unified UC Experience
Basically, Fuze are giving their customers everything they need for enterprise on a unified backend global platform. That means that all customers need to do is pick their device and use the service as they see fit. By delivering this simple and straightforward experience for customers, they’re increasing adoption and allowing people around the world to enjoy an easier service.
Fuze offer service in about 100 countries, but Wood was keen to point out that they can offer different things in different countries. “We can offer basic service in 100 countries, with the full range of services in around 40 countries. We think it’s important to be transparent about what we can actually do for our customers at the start of working with us.”
For Fuze, it’s crucial that they can provide localisation, and a comprehensive service, but that means getting through regulatory aspects, dealing with local devices, local traffic, and local providers.
Fuze Sells Differently
The last differentiating factor that Wood wanted to cover before we finished up our conversation, was the way that Fuze actually sells their products to the market.
“We bring in software sales people, train them into a well-defined, value-based sales process, and make sure that they’re ready to serve our customers.”
“One of the things that we offer as part of the sales process is something that we call a ‘business value assessment‘. Basically, this is something that allows us to go to customers and start building a unique solution for their needs. We look at different use cases in the business for collaborative tools, from receptionists to head-of-sale managers, and think about how we can deliver value.”
Fuze create a service that’s built around what their customers specifically need. We discuss what that company wants to start doing, what they want to stop doing, and where Fuze can play a part. By doing that, they can start to deliver a real collection of value-based improvements and direct cost savings across various aspects of the business. They can engage with end users and figure out what matters to them, then develop new value.
“We’re really starting to think about what the future of work looks like, and how what we’re doing affects the workplace. Right now, we have multiple different generations of users in the workplace. Some of those users prefer more traditional tools, whereas others want new applications. At Fuze, we’re trying to help people get ready for different and new experiences.”
Fuze are spending more time getting into the heads of their users to create better experiences for the future, and for the present. “Basically, we need to know how to create a more delightful experience for users. The world is changing; we’re all about thinking differently and preparing for the change.”
