COMPANY PROFILE Payne irons out mobile
Many comms professionals have had their fingers burned entering the complex world of mobile provisioning but Simon Payne believes he’s come up with a simple solution.
ike the basic tool that bears its name, Payne is convinced his Anvil unified billing solution will provide a solid platform for resellers to forge a successful future. He is chairman of The Fidelity Group, a full service comms provider he set up with long term partners Alan Shraga and Howard Richards two and a half years ago after successfully building and selling two businesses focused on fixed line minutes resale namely Cable Telecom and VNetworks.
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Payne identified a demand for a simple to use billing platform to address mobile solutions provision and set billing guru Richard’s and his software team the task of remodelling Fidelity’s Anvil platform to meet the need. In between times he and Shraga negotiated a Joined Up Communications partner deal with O2 and convinced the giant carrier that success on the channel was hinged on customer ownership. Over 1000 man hours and £50,000 were invested in the billing system, but it’s resulted in what Payne maintains is the channel’s most powerful yet simple to use billing platform which can handle the complexities of mobile provisioning and give partners what they need to keep customers
happy and earn healthy margins into the bargain. As Payne explained, the key to Anvil’s mobile module was having a real understanding of the processes a reseller goes through in signing up a mobile customer and providing the right handsets and ancillary services.
“With most of these things you have to start with manual processes so you can understand what needs to happen and at what stage and where the checks and the controls need to be. We have generated deal calculators showing the profit in the deal, the margin over the period, and a raft of other different aspects specific to mobile provisioning. This summary page is critical to be able to approve an order.
“Also, we have allowed for the fact that handsets are going to be changed, customers will change their minds a few times, they might want to elect to have handset insurance or not and so on. All of these things need to be a fluid process right up to the point that the order is signed.
“Sales people can go through the entire process on line with the customer logged into Anvil. It’s all tick box, there is no re-entry of any information, nothing has
L-R: Simon Payne, Chairman, Fidelity; Phil Harvey, Managing Director, Shine Telecom; Alan Shraga, Managing Director, Fidelity; Richard Sheldon, Tech Support Manager, Shine Telecom.
to be retyped, the system controls everything that the salesman can or cannot do and prevents an i-phone bolt on being sold with a Blackberry connection and things like that. Once the customer is happy, the salesperson can press a button and that generates an order form for the customer to sign either electronically or via a hard copy.” Fidelity trialled the system in house and identified where common mistakes were being made.
“Thirty per cent of orders that went through had some sort of mistake,” recalled Payne. “Regardless of who makes an error the important thing with the system we have got now is that it’s completely eradicated all the problems at our end, because the system won’t let you make a mistake. Any error is picked up instantly via the issues list on Anvil and a big flashing light on someone’s PC at Fidelity says a mistake as been made so we can rapidly get it fixed.” Fidelity are 100% channel focussed and Payne stresses that rather than looking at a billing system that would
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Marriot St. Pierre, Chepstow,Gwent. 16th June 2011
38 COMMS DEALER MAY 2011
best serve Fidelity, they looked at a system that would best serve its channel partners. Fidelity offers dealers a 50% revenue share and 50% of the customer value should the dealer wish to sell. It is also happy to work with channel wholesalers offering them 100% customer ownership via Fidelity’s O2 relationship. Payne says more partners are attracted to his company’s white label wholesale partnership programme and five major partners have already been signed up just a month from launch.
“On the wholesale model the wholesaler owns 100% of the customer, so we have no ownership at all, we just charge a premium for providing the CDRs through our relationship with O2. But our white label offer is proving to be most popular simply because resellers can see the value in customer ownership. “Not everybody wants to be doing this for the rest of their lives and if you don’t have something you can sell at some time in the future then really, what are you doing!”
One reseller that is crystal
clear about the value of adding mobile to its portfolio is Shine Telecom. Shine’s link up with Fidelity last month marks a milestone in the companyís history and was described as one of the most significant steps the firm could take towards further growth. “We have been looking for several years for a mobile opportunity that allowed us to retain true control and ownership of the customer and the offering from Fidelity via the O2 network finally fits our requirements,” commented Shineís Technical Support Manager Richard Sheldon.
“Our typical customer is a small business owner with less than 10 employees and mobile services are an ever increasing proportion of their communications spend. As fixed line services and revenues change, the ability to offer a more complete solution to our customers is vital. We will be taking on several additional staff to both market and support this new service, and we expect the coming 24 months to be an exciting period of growth for Shine Telecom on the back of the deal.” n
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