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By Iain Sinnott, Head of International Carriers, Enreach for Service Providers
Customers still want to transform and blend their technologies – if there’s a clear business benefit
With economic storm clouds gathering and inflation set to rise, organisations are focusing on their technology as an enabler of business outcomes. If outcomes can be tied to technology deployments, the investment case can still be made but investment in technology for technology’s sake will not be happening for the foreseeable future. In spite of the challenging environment, adoption of cloud communications looks set to continue because it has proved its value during the pandemic and because initiatives are already well underway and stopping before completion makes no sense.
“In the technology space, we’re part of the answer not part of the problem,” says Iain Sinnott, the Head of International Carriers at Enreach for Service Providers. “The last ten years has been dedicated to the optimisation of human resources and the technology is there to create better outcomes. Automating tasks that are time consuming has freed up humans to do a better job.”
The results of some of the adoptions are in and look positive but Sinnott points out that as the economic landscape tightens, the relevance of offerings such as Enreach’s increases but the focus has to be on how the technology enables business outcomes to be achieved. “Outcome selling is about understanding what the customer’s business is trying to deliver to its’ customers,” he adds. “Customers recognise the ways in which their customers’ businesses have change and how this affects how people want to interact. That encompasses a move to using blended technologies to create the solutions they need.”
Not everyone’s on board with transforming customers into users of blended technologies but many service providers now see it as an opportunity to demonstrate their value as specialists that understand end customers and their geographic markets. Differentiation on cloud communications apps and services is hard to achieve but in assembling the holistic package of apps, services and support relies on the integration ability of service providers to put together the blend that works best for customers.
“Our customers have demonstrated they understand the need to blend more technologies together and we see this in IT and security as much as in communications,” confirms Sinnott. “They respect the challenges customers face in HR, travel and office costs and we see businesses taking full advantage of adopting the right tools and seeing these as long-term assets. Those service providers who are open, aggressive and determined enough have a really bright future ahead but it is a now or never situation in terms of moving away from the legacy portfolio.”
Sinnott adds that Enreach’s strategy is to support its partners in enabling outcome selling. “We recognise we’re not the full solution but our concept is to leave the landscape open for people to create portfolios of services they believe in. Enreach sees the importance of application programme interfaces (APIs) to enable integrations and we have also committed to white-labelling our products so service provider customers can sell them under their own brands.”
Service providers and resellers are increasingly looking to white label products so they, rather than the vendor brand, get credited with delivering the technology dividend that the customer experiences. With service providers seeing customer ownership eroded by product vendors, being able to demonstrate innovation and value creation under their own brands is an important value proposition for service providers. In addition, a healthy service provider market allows for sector-specific solutions and integrations that ensure diversity of choice for end users and prevents the market place from becoming limited to the products from on the largest brands.
By enabling partners with its proven portfolio of white-label products, resellers and service providers can blend services and apps to meet their end customers’ specific needs and this is where the business outcomes can be achieved. “We’ve seen people take great advantage of the need for technological change and the ability to move away from voice-only solutions,” he explains. “Our responsibility here is to change the sales model and the conversation and challenge customers’ understandings of what is good for their business. By being a trusted adviser we can help partners get deeper into what each technology deployments means and the outcomes for themselves and their customer will be. That’s an exciting opportunity to continue the momentum of the last few years into the next two-to-five years.”
Read the full article on UC TODAY