Adapting Your Tech Portfolio for Success in the Channel
The Demand and Decline of Technologies
Analytics and AI-driven analytics are massively in demand since they can improve customer experience and enable providers to be more competitive.
The latest technologies empower analytics to add value to both the channel provider’s proposition and their customer’s business. Analytics have become essential in business, driving better and smarter decisions.
AI-based technologies will be a game changer in 2024. Leveraging AI capabilities, insights can be delivered quickly and at scale. For example, AI-powered analysis of call recordings can automatically identify specific keywords and topics without having to listen to every call, with clips from recordings easily highlighted and instantly shared for review. Analysis across large pools of data without human interaction will deliver rapid insight into customer sentiment, profile trends and behavioural patterns and, ultimately, drive business performance.
Leveraging Analytics and Call Recording
Adding new products to a portfolio requires considerable investment and impacts every part of a business. Resellers therefore need to find technologies that can add value across their entire portfolio and be applied easily to different business streams. Finding commonality across the business makes it easier to train sales teams as well as to promote and sell solutions.
Millions of organisations are now using Microsoft Teams, with many starting to use Microsoft Teams Phone, and in many cases other cloud voice technologies are also in operation alongside Microsoft, such as Cisco BroadWorks or Cisco Webex Calling. There is a need for analytics that can accommodate multiple platforms and offer a mature API framework to enable the delivery of analytics in the way that a customer needs, whilst making provisioning easy through integration within reseller sales journeys.
None of us in this industry are strangers to change, and as technology continues to evolve, resellers need to move in step. By choosing flexible solutions that are compatible across platforms, they can standardise their offering and make it easier to do so.
Exploring Broad Opportunities and Quick Wins for Resellers and MSPs
Analytics and call recording are traditional quick wins for providers since this is where they can make a measurable difference and add value to customer implementations and customer experience.
However, simple messaging is critical. The aim is to minimise buzzwords and stick with messages that end customers can easily relate to and that relate to their business such as measuring the cost of unreturned missed calls or measuring a return on investment. It’s a lot easier to capture imaginations by explaining that missed calls are missed opportunities, than it is to talk about data and statistics.
Easy deployment is also essential to secure customers quickly. Online sign-ups with low-cost monthly pricing via subscription models are not only low risk to customers but also low risk to the reseller. And once a customer starts to rely on their analytics, the more likely they will remain a customer.
Anticipating Long-Term Channel Shifts and Their Impact on Evolving Portfolios
Delivering the right information to the right people at the right time is becoming increasingly important; personalisation of services at scale. Expectations are changing and as such the channel needs to provide solutions that deliver the right information to the right persona – customers no longer want to search for what they need, they expect everything to be delivered to them in the way they expect to consume it.
APIs play a significant role in being able to meet these changing expectations, together with the consolidation of services as technologies advance, in order simplify propositions. Channel providers should prioritise simplification of messaging as their portfolios evolve in order to bring their customers on the journey.
Partners in Progress: How Vendors Can Support Resellers and MSPs
The younger generation are tomorrow’s customers. Services will need to evolve and simplify to match the way this group use technology and communicate.
Marketing to this group will require different messages at each stage of the marketing funnel, and an awareness of the top of funnel activity is becoming ever more important. This means ensuring the right information and content is available at the right time during the buying process and that the messages speak to the audience at every point. The traditional view of pushing for a contact opportunity as early as possible might not be how these newer decision makers want to learn about solutions, so consideration of their behaviour and preferences is critical. AI-driven insights will help to identify what works and what doesn’t by analysing interactions in order to drive activity that works.
As new technologies enter the frame with buzzwords like ‘AI’, the practical application and real-life benefits are what matter. Vendors need to support their resellers and MSPs through clarity and relevance of messaging at every stage of the buying process and of the value offered by the products on offer.