As resellers battle to differentiate and compete while still providing the familiar service their customers want, there is an increasing need to offer a wide range of cloud-based capabilities. The traditional reseller market is rapidly transforming away from reselling traditional communications systems such as PBX as customer migrate to cloud communications. The challenge for resellers is to avoid being left behind as the cloud giants attempt market domination and they are looking to achieve this by bringing large corporate cloud communications capabilities to smaller businesses.
A key step in enabling this is to allow resellers to sell the services their customers need in ways that they find attractive and, with more and more millennials occupying decision-making positions in the workplace, enabling simple, easy-to-use online purchasing is vital. With this in mind, Enreach has developed Webshop as a Service (WaaS), initially for its Voiceworks partners in The Netherlands, enabling them to use their own branded webshop as well as the functionality to add their own non-Enreach offerings such as PCs, mobiles and other hardware or services.
“Our indirect sales channel in The Netherlands has around 200 partners who resell our portfolio in a white-labelled way,” said Mathijs Leenheer, the Group Product & Proposition Director at Enreach. “They buy wholesale building blocks from Voiceworks, which are unbranded, and build their own propositions out of those. Partners range from those with two, three or four employees to those with more than 100 so the level of maturity differs. However, most are from a telco background and started a long time ago reselling PBX.”
Customers are researching options and want to buy online but setting up a webshop for complex services is not a simple task for smaller organisations. “It sounds simple and easy to set up and webshop and that’s true if you want to sell T-shirts in different sizes and colours with one-off payments but as soon as you start to consider telco products, which are often bundled and subscription based, it’s a totally different beast,” explained Leenheer. “We therefore went on a journey with five pilot partners and, together with a web agency, we developed a webshop specifically for cloud-based telco and IT services. We’ve ended up with an easy-to-configure webshop platform that partners can use to configure their own products and bundles based on the Voiceworks portfolio but also giving them the ability to add their own services to it and brand it as their own.”
