With the end of the year almost here, service providers, channel partners, and companies in the cloud communications space are gearing up to embark upon their strategies for 2020. The marketplace is evolving at a constantly rapid pace, which means that no matter what kind of organisation you’re running, you can’t afford to stay still.
Tollring, a leading provider of call analytics, recording and telecoms security solutions, believes that relevancy is the key to getting a head start on tomorrow’s UC trends. As the demands and needs of the end customer keeps moving, service providers and their resellers need to move with them.
We spoke to Tony Martino, the CEO of Tollring, to discuss the current and future trends affecting today’s service providers and channel partners in their bid to stay relevant in 2020.
How Has the Market Changed for Service Providers Lately?
There’s a lot of activity going on in the service provider world these days, and I’ve seen plenty of evidence of transformation in the UC space myself when attending recent events and conferences. Tony told me that for Tollring’s service provider customers, there’s a lot of interest in the cloud economy, particularly from customers and channel partners that are looking to build differentiated services.
“Today’s customers and channel partners aren’t just looking for one provider or supplier anymore. Everyone is looking at multiple platforms that they can combine for a more customised best-of-breed solution. Thanks to our interoperability and integration options, and with collaboration and productivity tools increasing in popularity, our solutions are proving to add value across service providers’ UCaaS suites.”
Tony noted that APIs and integrations are becoming a prerequisite for today’s service providers. To ensure that it can deliver the best experience, Tollring is focusing heavily on arming service providers with the tools and services they need to offer a truly strong proposition.
“We’re investing heavily in these partnerships to provide our channel community with the best possible offering against each of the platforms that we support. Our primary drive is to streamline and consolidate processes in order to bring a richer portfolio of products to end user customers. However, this does mean that we’re having to choose who we work with more carefully to maintain great customer experience.”
Channel Partner and Reseller Differentiation
Perhaps one of the most significant conversations for channel partners and resellers in the modern landscape is around how they can differentiate in such a cluttered marketplace. Tollring’s suite of business productivity tools that includes analytics, call recording along with their toll fraud security solutions provides great value-adds to bring into a core UCaaS platform, which makes those service providers that Tollring works with an excellent option for many resellers.
“For resellers, it’s all about figuring out how to use the right selection of tools to offer their customers. They need to have at their disposal a set of business productivity and collaboration tools that return real business benefits. Delivering a measurable ROI in terms of these business improvements will help the reseller remain at the heart of their customer’s requirements allowing them to stay relevant in an ever-evolving marketplace.”
For service providers to deliver the right solution today, they need to make it as easy and as seamless as possible for channel partners to adopt their tools.
“Our focus at Tollring is to make it easier for resellers to utilise our solutions alongside the other functionalities that our service providers can offer”
“It’s all about creating a truly flexible and scalable environment. We need to make it as easy as possible for our channel partners to turn on new features for end customers, and that starts with integrations between service partners. The work we do isn’t just on front-end features, but on how we offer easier adoption and interoperability on the back-end too.”
Delivering Great Customer Experience
Over the last year, businesses have increasingly been focusing on the work that they can do to deliver a first-class customer experience. Tony told me that he thinks the cloud service wrap is far more advanced today than it used to be. “We’ve seen huge investment and improvements in simplifying and delivering cloud integrations compared to just a couple of years ago. We’re in a lot of discussions with our service provider partners to explore making even further enhancements to the customer on-boarding and license management journey. This will allow our channel resellers to take real advantage of monetising these additional services without complications.”
According to Tony, companies today realise that if you can make something easy to purchase and deploy, then adoption levels will go through the roof. As cloud market share continues to increase, partners who can improve their adoption rates by even a small fraction might see huge results.
“Our aim is to deliver a single pane of glass ‘marketplace’ approach whereby our suite of products is made available seamlessly to our channel and can be delivered to customers on demand.”
Remaining Relevant in the Year Ahead
The traditional telecoms channel reseller is seeing a lot of competition in the marketplace, not just from the communication environment, but from other adjacent markets too. Today’s resellers need to find new ways to differentiate themselves, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remain competitive.
Tony says that achieving success is all about meeting the individual needs of the end-user. If channel resellers can offer customers a broader range of value-added services, this will be significant in staying competitive.
“If you want to differentiate yourself in this cluttered space, then you need to be able to offer the right USPs around service and customer experience, remaining relevant to your customers’ evolving needs.”
In 2020, Tollring will be continuing to enhance its product suite to provide features that will both benefit SMEs and the mid-market environment. Tollring will evolve in line with advancements in technology and customer demands.
For example, Tollring will be watching advancements in AI with interest, specifically in relation to speech analytics and predictive analytics. The challenge will be to achieve simple adoption whilst keeping costs to a minimum.
Tollring is also seeing a greater demand for business analytics across collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. There are a lot of potential opportunities here for partners and resellers to consider their options around the Microsoft offering and service provider-based collaboration tools.
Tony concludes,
“The opportunities are massive for everyone in this industry. The key to success is remaining relevant, whether you’re a vendor, partner or reseller”
