At a time of unprecedented global crisis, the CSR departments of big brands around the world are rising to the challenge with discounts and waived fees, and the world of unified communications is no different. Established collaboration platforms like Zoom are offering free premium upgrades to support education and business continuity — but Scott Goodwin, CEO of Gather, pointed out the business benefits these service providers will receive through their generosity:
“Deep-pocketed organisations can give their services for free right now, several have extended their “free trial accounts” for 3 months but I doubt this will last”
“However in the meantime, these bigger players will capture 10s of thousands of customers, they will introduce them to a new way of working and use cutting edge of digital marketing to bring them through a marketing funnel — so further down the line, to encourage them to move into a monetised solution”, he told me. Free is just good business.
This reflects a deeper trend which led Goodwin to the creation of Gather in the first place, as he perceived the growing dominance of a handful of key brands in the video collaboration aspects of UC as a threat to competitiveness and diversity in the emerging industry. “I wanted to create a compelling alternative, and offer it on a purely white-label basis, to enable channel partners to create their own frictionless onboarding and customer journeys”, he continued.
In offering a robust, scalable, high-grade audio and video product which channel partners can brand as their own enables them to offer their customers easy and free access to their own customers. This not only defends their customers from operators with competing products and services but also enables CSP’s to offer tremendous value to their customers in a time of need.
Investing in trust
As Goodwin points out, solving problems for people at their point of greatest need is smart business, and channel partners should not shy away from marketing during the health crisis, whether to support the millions experimenting with online collaboration for the first time, or those deepening their engagement with cloud-based UC.
“Smaller players in the market have always had a better understanding of their customers, they have long-term relationships, they may even be local. If they’ve solved a customer’s data issues, their WiFi networks, they’ve built trust already.” Trust, which is badly needed, at a time of disaster response.
Furthermore, the scale and speed at which customers are moving to the cloud is catching even the biggest of players out. You only need to spend time on DownDetector.com to see the outages and troubles experienced by Microsoft Teams users, Cisco Webex and Zoom. Service providers can offer a better or complimentary service under their brand, and help their customers in the process.
And while customers casting around for their first taste of effective online collaboration might not care today about market diversity and avoiding monopolisation of the space, those of us already inside it know there’s no going back for them now.
Even if — when — we reach a point that everyone is advised by policymakers that it’s fine to return to a colocated workspace, will people want to return quickly and to a life held within crowded offices and face-to-face meetings? Possibly not, when they’ve had a taste of what the latest in cloud-based UC can offer them, in terms of productivity, effectiveness, data security, flexibility and improved risk management…
So just because things are moving fast, it’s important we don’t let the UC equivalent of Amazon emerge, to eat all the competitors. When we come out of this crisis into whatever the new normal looks like, then a healthy, diverse and competitive UC landscape will benefit us all.
