The recent merger of Connect Managed Services and G3 Comms created one of the UK’s largest Customer experience and unified communications offerings, with combined annual revenues in excess of £50m. Both businesses have extensive heritage, with G3 focusing on the mid-market while Connect’s background is with enterprise. But they have a great deal in common when it comes to values and flexibility, and combining their offering enables both extended geographic reach as well as a vendor-agnostic and unified response to customer demand.
But what does this mean for the end user – the customer’s customer? We caught up with Alex Tupman, and James Arnold-Roberts, CEO and MD respectively of the new merged group, to explore their vision for the new partnership.
Proprietary monitoring preempts problems
Tupman was keen to emphasise how their extended capabilities enabled them to get ahead of customer needs, bringing unprecedented uptime to contracts: “Our proprietary monitoring system automatically injects tickets, and allows us to not only respond much more quickly to incidents, but actually prevent them proactively, because we can we can map and plan around what incidents have occurred previously and look at the patterns and determine what needs to be done, to stop that from happening again.”
Agile, multi-vendor solution
Connect’s research and development insight have enabled the building of unique reporting and application integration, essential for the future growth of the combined service, as customer needs become ever more complex – something which is only going to continue.
“[Together] we’re agile and nimble…we’ve got the skill-sets within the toolbox to be able to understand and decipher and deliver on that”
As Arnold-Roberts indicated, coming together in this way enables them to offer clients a ‘single pane of glass’ through which to address their communications needs.
Remaining vendor-agnostic is critical part of that agility and responsiveness, and a key differentiator in the marketplace today:
“Other aggregators in the space are single-vendor specialists, but in addition to Microsoft capabilities we’ve got Cisco, Avaya… Even Amazon Connect. We’ve just built the very first Amazon Connect contact centre for a UK bank, which is Lloyd IF Cogent Finance. [Partnering with G3] means we can now offer that to the mid-market as well”, indicated Tupman.
“Together we can cover all angles”, agreed Arnold-Roberts,
“We’re all about the solution – as customer’s requirements change, we’ll be placed to deliver on that. Our customer’s businesses will change, their customers will change…but we’ll be responsive”
The future is scalable
Looking ahead, that responsiveness is closely connected with the granular and scalable ‘as a service’ model.
Increasingly customers are seeking to move away from fixed term contracts with application service providers, toward consumption-based contracting – enabling rapid growth, meaningful billing, and real choice in a competitive and fast-moving space.
As Arnold-Roberts concluded: “We can be the hub – customers sign a managed service contract with us, and we then give them the ability to choose which applications they utilise, then we’ve got the ability to flex – and having the network, we’ve got the ability to deliver on changing requirements, whatever the customers need”.
With the recent investment from Apiary Capital, the M&A strategy will continue, with a view to creating a unified subscription service which can offer whatever customer demand requires in the years ahead.
For the end user, an ever-more frictionless and unified experience is the end goal, around which these two providers are united and forward-looking…so that’s a win-win for both clients and end customers.
