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them,” said Wettemann. “We see that in a lot of areas where a cloud solution means that one department may have bought one thing to add on without knowing what the other department is necessarily doing. “Businesses could be executing different channel strategies for chatbots, IVRs, and self-service, where it would make sense to consolidate the solution instead of learning three different tools.”
is a challenge that we see all the time.”
Route for reseller Rather than try to please everyone,
Wettemann said that businesses are looking to resellers to reduce the complexity that they deal with. “With this trend toward rationalisation, customers are looking to resellers to help them solve problems,” said Wettemann, “they don’t necessarily need to know or want to know what those connected pieces may be. “If resellers can go to a customer with a specific solution that solves a problem that they understand, they can reduce the complexity for the customer, and reduce the number of management points that customer has to evaluate. “The more they can be the single touch point, to make sure the customer gets value across the solution, the more successful their strategy is going to be.” “Resellers can capture a huge part of the market just by reselling Microsoft and the professional managed services added on top,” said Watson. “Where it becomes interesting is if a reseller can build a package around the Microsoft stack, for example, connectivity, mobile phone licences, and contact centre, it’s more work for the customer to migrate each service to a new provider point by point.
All things to all people Technology audits have become an
increasingly common practice since the turn of the decade. With everyone working from home, the scattergun approach to adopting platforms for accounting, marketing, and customer communications has added up and resulted in a smaller list of platforms. Therefore resellers may be tempted to try to cast a wide net in order to catch as many businesses as possible, but Watson highlighted the problems with being “all things to all people.” “To start with, resellers will likely have to re- educate their salespeople about how to sell the new services, and technical teams also need to learn how to support and integrate those things too. “Customer base is another issue, because they won’t be used to buying these new services from one place. As a result, the job will be to convince an existing customer base to buy additional services, or find new customers. “It seems appealing to offer everything, but the practicality of adding a lot of new services
Patrick Watson Head of Research
cavellgroup.com
“The benefit comes when resellers build a solution of services around a technology stack, because it becomes a challenge for businesses to move away.”
It seems appealing to offer everything, but the practicality of adding a lot of new services is a challenge that we see all the time.
ucadvanced.com
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