INDUSTRY NEWS COMMENT: OWNERSHIP MATTERS Simon Payne
“It’s like selling the bricks for a short-term profit when you should be building a house.”
THE holy grail of mobile is customer ownership. Giving a customer to a network provider is the same as giving the customer away. Of course you get an up-front bonus but that’s where the benefits end. The carrier is fully entitled to approach that client for landline services, hardware, insurance or any other service they want. They can compete with you on your core products in that client. They can sell a phone system to that client or discount the landline service to below your cost. It never pays to give a customer away. Just the mobile contract is
worth more let alone the protection of other services. I am continually surprised by people’s short-term views on customer ownership and the little they are prepared to sell them for. It’s like selling the bricks for a short-term profit when you should be building a house with them. Customers are valued at a multiple of the future profits they are expected to deliver to the company. These profits can be from any product or service that the company provides or expects to provide. A typical deal in the mobile world might be where a customer is contracted to generate £1,000 in profit over two years on line rental excluding overs. The networks are paying about £700 for that client. Once they own the client, they have the benefit of the remaining £300 plus all the out-of-bundle calls plus the landline plus hardware plus ancillary services such as insurance. In total that same customer would have a value closer to £7,000 not £700. I intend to sell multiple services to all clients and maximise their value. My door is open for anyone who wants to give away ownership at such a discounted level.
Simon Payne, Chairman, Fidelity Group
Daisy hones O2 partner programme
DAISY Distribution has re- launched its O2 Approved partner programme in a move that introduces a revised perfor- mance matrix for partners. O2 Approved is the distri- bution equivalent of the direct Centre of Excellence pro- gramme and draws together the top performing partners from the Daisy Distribution base into a single framework. The O2 Approved relaunch prompted a new influx of part- ners and ushered in a more rigid performance matrix bolstered by an enhanced set of tools, benefits and support.
Head of Marketing Julien Parven said: “With the enhance- ments given to us by O2 plus our own additions – marketing support, funding packages and other tools – we have a full wrap to enable our partners to develop and significantly grow their O2 businesses.” The O2 Approved pro- gramme is underpinned by the performance matrix that now takes into account the key driv- ers behind O2’s strategy of business acquisition, customer satisfaction, landline sales and customer retention.
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Proteus gets G3 approval
CTI GROUP’S just-launched Proteus 7 has been given the big thumbs up by G3 Telecom- munications following its early adoption of the new call accounting solution. According to Tony Parish, MD of G3, the functionality, ease of use and high scalability of the system has proved to be a big hit with clients. “With the enhancements of Proteus 7 we believe that this will continue to be the case going forward,” commented Parish.
Proteus 7 is the latest ver- sion of CTI’s scalable hosted or premises-based call accounting solution for mobile, VoIP and PBX telephony systems. It builds on earlier ver- sions and offers an enhanced user interface that provides wider browser support includ- ing Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. The ActiveX and Java dependencies of older versions have been eradicated and the new-look interface allows users to customise the screen layout to improve data presentation and simplify screen layout on administrative options.
New data sets have also been added including reporting tax on billing reports and an enhanced
Trevor Davis
“We designed Proteus 7 to make access to data simpler and richer for the end user.”
auditing system that enables IT managers to track any changes made to Proteus. Trevor Davis, Senior Product
Manager, CTI Group, stated: “Enhancing the user experience was at the heart of the develop- ment of Proteus 7.
“Customer research showed that a broad mix of employees were using Proteus for numer- ous business processes includ- ing cost analysis, customer bill- ing, fraud detection and network optimisation. “We designed Proteus 7 to make access to data simpler and richer for the end user, with fewer mouse clicks, customis- able screens and powerful cus- tom report building tools.”
6 COMMS DEALER MAY 2011
www.comms-dealer.com
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