Hosted Telephony: How Managed Service Providers Can Enhance and Protect Profitability

Calling all Value-Added Resellers – how does an 80% margin sound?

In the ever-evolving, high-demand communication technology space, it’s a number that is readily achievable provided you have the right solution, support wrap, and commercials behind you.

It’s about partnering with a vendor that is easy to do business with, and that can be relied upon to equip you with everything you need to serve your end customer organisations in ways they crave.

The functionality, dependability, and profitability boxes must contain big ticks, of course.

However, just as importantly, a two-way relationship must exist that is characterised by a culture conducive to not only deriving that margin, but also protecting and increasing it long-term.

Here, Cliff Chandler, Head of Sales at leading UK-based hosted telephony provider NTA, shares how its white-label reseller offering delivers on all fronts…

Own-Branding

It’s too easy for businesses to obtain a quote from a service provider and then simply go off and source identical products more cheaply online. All our products and services are white-label and we actively encourage our reseller partners to rename them so they cannot be found anywhere else. By naming them themselves, the only place those products can be found online is on the reseller’s own website. Because we ship our hardware in direct from the manufacturer, there is no middleman and we pass that commercial benefit on. That means there is typically already, say, 30 per cent profit available on a handset before the reseller has even thought about setting its own retail price. By giving it a unique name, and us branding the device accordingly, customers nor competitors can obtain an equivalent price. We produce branded product brochures for our resellers too, and those unique product names also appear there. It’s just part of the wider sales support we provide. It’s all about the focus being on the reseller’s brand and that brand being constantly at the forefront of their customers’ minds. End users look down at their devices and see their service providers’ name and logo. It’s a simple thing but so effective.

Auto-Provisioning

The costs of delivering and provisioning solutions and hardware can seriously erode margins. For example, if an individual phone takes 15-20 minutes to provision, and a customer has procured 60 phones, that can be up to 20 hours. That equates to two days of an engineer’s time. All of our hardware is automatically provisioned so all of that time and cost is saved. It’s just a simple case of plug and play – all of the technical set-up is done on the back-end. Provisioning is just a few simple steps on a computer that can be copied and pasted multiple times for multiple devices. They don’t even have to be removed from the box. When provisioning is a cost to the reseller that it either can’t or doesn’t want to pass on to the customer, our approach can make a huge difference to the bottom line.

Be a Broker

Protecting and growing revenue – and therefore margin – is helped hugely if a reseller can offer choice. That’s because communication technology is always about horses for courses. End user organisations’ challenges are often complex; sometimes unique to them and requiring particular functionality or commercial terms. If a service provider has two or three options, the opportunity to win the deal is greater. If it’s one of our resellers but we aren’t the preferred vendor, we would just hope to win with them in the future. We are not exclusive, and we have no customers who are exclusive – that’s just best practice and creates the most conducive environment in which to succeed and grow. For our part, we enable resellers to offer choice in the form of multiple commercial models. It’s all about understanding that one size doesn’t fit all, and that choice and flexibility is key.

SIP-agnostic

Plenty of organisations modernizing their communication systems want to keep their existing hardware, so the first thing they often ask a service provider is: ‘Can we bring it with us?’ We are SIP-agnostic, so our resellers’ answer to that question is: ‘Yes’. Many other vendors can only accommodate certain phones. Having a SIP-agnostic offering means service providers can retain customers more easily and for longer.

Innovation

Responding rapidly to end user organisations’ constantly-evolving challenges is key to keeping them onboard. Enhancing functionality that addresses their specific needs or challenges can be the difference between retaining and losing a customer. Of course, the huge international vendors have vast innovation capability, but their reseller partners who request functionality tweaks must join a very long queue and wait a very long time. We design and build our own solutions and can assess and act on functionality enhancement requests extremely quickly. Our engineers will quickly look at it, cost it, and work out viability. That agility can make a huge difference to service providers’ ability to meet their customers’ needs.

Engineering Support

Prompt and effective resolution of an issue is super-important when it comes to protecting margin. Shockingly for us, some resellers are being charged extra for break-fix support by their vendor partners if certain sales targets are not achieved. That can drastically impact margin and critically-damage a customer relationship. Crucially, calls into our engineering support teams are answered by the same people qualified to fix the problem. A ticket isn’t raised which then gets sent somewhere else – perhaps a separate, outsourced engineering team – and sits in a queue for an age. Prompt action from trained experts on the end of the first phone call – that’s what end customers want and that’s what our resellers can deliver.

Frictionless Billing

Most third-party billing platforms start from around £100 a month – a cost that impacts directly on margin. Our reseller partners can bill their customers professionally and effectively for free by using our own billing platform. It’s all about making doing business with us as easy and as profitable as possible.

To learn more about how NTA can help your business protect and grow its margin, visit the website.