MARKET REVIEW e demand for outsourcing
engineering services with our accredited team on an a la carte basis, which can be of real benefit where the cost of in-house vendor accreditation cannot be justified by the channel for the low volume of sales which actually require it,” commented Ballinger.
The biggest benefit to resellers has to be trust, believes Ballinger. “We deliver a quality installation, working with the channel, allowing them to cover more opportunities in a very competitive environment, confident that we will reflect their levels of customer service to the end user. All channels are reluctant to bring another party into the customer relationship, as they may be seen as competition. Nine maintains a high level of integrity with the channels and all those that have used our services once have used them again. That is a great message for us.”
Demand has changed away from basic maintenance to partners wanting a multitude of services. This still includes basic maintenance but,
observes Angus McCaffery, Director at Maintel, also includes working with partners to provide auditing, designing, advising, before supplying, project managing and maintaining the whole solution. “The key is to identify what it is you are good at and focus on this,” he said. “Our strengths are in ensuring that we have engineers in the right place at the right time to do the job right first time. In essence, our engineers are our product and we invest heavily in our engineers’ training and development to keep them up to date with the latest technologies. This process is wholly led by the demands of our partners, which include several of the UK’s top telecoms and data businesses.”
Profit matters
Critical for partners is that they not only need a job to be carried out well, they also need to make a profit, and with Maintel’s economies of scale it can provide services at a level that enables the reseller to sell on at a margin and without the cost or
hassle of doing it themselves. Maintel has worked with third parties for 20 years and has the creditability and trust of the reseller community. “Whether a global telco or a smaller local reseller, we are completely trusted and remain impartial while protecting the resellers’ interests. We are proud of this fact and it’s testament to the repeat long -term business we win,” enthused McCaffery.
Maintel’s main focus is to continue to invest in data skills. McCaffery added: “We have identified a need to enhance our data skills, particularly for building and running the WAN and LAN services. We tend to be discreet about our service provision but it’s worth stating that we currently have one of the largest data networks under our management and already carry out a lot more data work than many in the industry recognise.”
Maintel’s online fault reporting tool Webcall provides partners with a
transparent view of customer information, right down to live faults with all of the related notes. “Nothing is out of sight plus the partner can use the tool to look at fault history or system information, run reports and view trends. More than 20 per cent of all faults logged with Maintel are logged online,” added McCaffery.
Extended workforce Nimans’ On-Site Services division also acts as an extension to a reseller’s own workforce. Andrew Atack, Nimans’ Technical Support and Services Manager, said: “We provide resellers with UK-wide access to installation, maintenance and professional services such as project management. This service is part of our ethos to deliver complete reseller solutions from start to finish, across all aspects of the supply chain.
“I don’t think the concept has fully taken off yet. There’s still great potential about how we as businesses can share resources geographically. Providing it
is managed and delivered as a white label service it can work very well. In many ways it’s a common sense solution with no commercial conflicts.”
The On-Site Services division is particularly attractive to smaller resellers, however no matter what size of company, resource issues should not restrict sales potential, says Atack. “Smaller companies can be restricted in selling because they haven’t always got the manpower to deliver what customers require,” he added.
“We know of dealers that are sales-based and rely on third party maintenance. There is also a lot of legacy products that people can no longer maintain because they can’t source the spares. A smaller reseller that may have sites scattered across the country will rely on us for those that can’t be maintained. We have customers in Ireland with sites in Scotland where it isn’t viable to send out their own staff. It comes down to building productive partnerships.”
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www.comms-dealer.com
COMMS DEALER JUNE 2011 53
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