IN ASSOCIATION WITH ECLIPSE arch to subscription model
route to offer customers reliability wherever they are located: “I have got so many customers stuck with 2mg but more importantly 200k up. To go in there and say I can give you 10 down and 3 up tomorrow is fantastic.”
Connectivity
Connectivity costs are also a key element as Stephen Dracup, Managing Director of service provider Chess Telecom stressed: “The cost of the connectivity for small customers is crucial. If you are a 100 person organisation a leased line is fine and if you can’t segment that you put another one in. The majority of our customers are 2,3,4 people – which is the vast majority of business customers in the UK anyway – and there is no quality of service running over DSL. You need an analogue line in to make it voice work. IP to IP trunking is the end game on this. At the higher end Microsoft Lync is predicated on a universally consumable network.”
Ian Fishwick, Managing Director of Adept Telecom, which received a Plain English Award recently, agreed: “We all know there is no such thing as 100 per cent SLA on broadband. It does have stale sessions, it does stop. You can have the fattest, fastest pipe in the world but if it drops out every five or 10 days and somebody has to go and push a button that says ‘set router’ people in a call centre sales environment will go through the ceiling. So it kind of depends what you are and what you do but the lack of 100 per cent SLA on broadband is shocking. What the hell is a five day SLA on any product in the UK? You can’t present
that as business class and if you try to present Disaster Recovery on that your sale goes out of the window.”
The group was in harness that subscription models are ubiquitous in the shape of monthly mobile contracts which few people argue against. Hughes commented: “Nobody wants to pay ¬£600 for an iPhone or Blackberry they want a fixed fee every month and they want a technology refresh every 18 months to two years and that’s what we are moving towards with hosted.”
Pink said when leasing became untenable he started his own equipment self- funded rental programme. “We found we had 40 customers who use that for everything. Now all they do is phone us up and say can we add another laptop to our agreement. We update the agreement and the laptop goes out next day done and dusted. The same can apply to a CCTV system or whatever is required.
Everything a customer uses including broadband, mobiles, computers can all be on a monthly fixed fee. And we make it all work. He will never move 13 other products to 13 other providers. It makes the customer very sticky for us.”
Service is King As Pete Tomlinson pointed out, a subscription model may be the future, but you had better be 100 per cent confident in the service experience you provide. If people stop using something or decide they don’t need to pay for 200 plus features of a hosted PBX that are not being used, they’ll simply switch off the monthly payment.
The group agreed that business continuity was the counter argument although it was not a primary concern at the Eclipse BT Tower insight day. “What happens when things go down? When you are talking about subscription models we need to build more levels
of security into what we offer rather than lines and product,” said Donohoe.
Bramwell added: “I think it’s down to the type of business you are selling to. We do a lot of business in the City with financial services companies so DR strategy and business continuity are one of the main reasons why we look to a hosted model because if lines go down they need to be able to keep recording calls.”
All the participants agreed that success with the subscription model was based on service standards and adding value, especially as the consumerisation of broadband was eroding profits. Indications from the group were that broadband supply might have to be ‘built in’ to a service plan. “We are in a society that wants faster better cheaper. How can I sell fibre broadband for £50 to a business when Sky give it away for £20,” said Fishwick. “Heavily subsidised Plusnet and their brass band
are destroying our world but unless you can articulate why people should pay more for business broadband you’ve got a problem.”
David Hughes echoed the sentiment: “You can’t compete with the marketing budgets of Sky and Plusnet. I put broadband in for my own mum at cost and she said to me thanks but I’m, moving to Sky. Then she called me and said she couldn’t download videos our kids has made and she says to me can you come and fix it and I said no, ring Sky! We chose Eclipse because of their Sentinel product. When things are going wrong we were aware of it before the customer. So it wasn’t that it was faster and better. We bought into it because we could offer our business customer’s a better service.”
The last word went to James Pink: “We serve our customers to the eyeballs. That’s the big difference. We are worth the money on our own without the ADSL.” n
To learn more go to:
http://www.eclipse.net.uk/landing/selling-the-cloud www.comms-dealer.com COMMS DEALER AUGUST 2012 39
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