Evolutionary Strategies for the Telecoms Channel: Meeting Modern Business Needs

Creating a Full-Service Brand Experience

The MSP landscape is evolving. Simply reselling technology and making a margin is no longer a viable option, the channel must focus on differentiation.

We are seeing increasing focus on best of breed technologies, ensuring they can deliver value to their customers by leveraging technology (mobile, UCaaS and consultancy) and creating a full-service wrap, white-labelled under their own branding.

From Tollring’s perspective, we service the channel with our analytics and call recording solutions. We are increasingly seeing providers bundle analytics as part of their service for every customer.  This not only provides the customer with a deeper understanding of their own communications and collaboration activities, but empowers the service provider to deliver a stronger proposition to their customer.

As services develop, MSPs will be looking to deliver a one-stop-shop to ensure they stay relevant and can meet their customers’ needs.  This might mean offering different solutions for different parts of the business, for example Microsoft Teams Phone for back-office staff alongside a formal or informal call centre capability for customer facing teams. However, it must all be joined up, and services like analytics are a great way to ensure your customers can leverage the full benefits of the technologies.

Analytics Integration: Empowering Service Providers

Telephony providers are having to become modern communications providers that can deliver everything from telephony, collaboration, back-office services and mobility. The channel is having to reinvent itself and look at themselves differently to be able to offer a more unified ‘one-stop-shop’ approach for everything a customer needs across all communications and the broader collaboration ecosystem of the technology.

In terms of drivers, it is difficult to avoid mentioning big juggernauts like Microsoft, which is growing rapidly with Teams Phone and will take a large market share over the next few years. From our recent discussions with partners, many are already changing their strategies by replacing their traditional telecoms platforms with this.

Microsoft is supporting this by working closely with the channel to help them evolve their digital offerings and support the transition to a one-stop-shop format. Microsoft currently has four million unique monthly users of their marketplace (Canalys), so it presents a valuable route to market for the channel.  The marketplace makes it seamless to buy, but when you consider that the average company maintains 600 SaaS apps (Canalys), it requires the MSP to differentiate their offer and ensure customers can optimise the technology, leverage the capabilities and achieve the desired efficiencies.

Canalys also predicts that a third of all marketplace transactions will be via partners within the next few years; it’s not just a direct sales play. With APIs, these marketplaces will evolve so that service providers can procure and provision services from an external marketplace whilst retaining their own brand.

Acquisitions and consolidation will continue at an aggressive pace. The acquisitive companies have all the technologies and unifying services they need, they are purchasing the small resellers in order to build their customer databases.