The ability to see which people from your network of customers and partners is online and available is one of the most underrated features of UC. Called ‘presence’, it all but eliminates time-wasting telephone tag.
Associated instant messaging often makes voicemail redundant. See if someone is online and click to call; if they’re away or busy, drop them a quick text message. The productivity and speed savings are immense.
There’s another reason to accelerate depreciation of a business’ old phones: suffering competitiveness.
Rob Dell, managing director of Melbourne solutions provider IComm, says old phone systems block the kind of digital business model transformation that Australian businesses need in order to stay relevant.
“The days of the old hardwired phone is a blocker to enable business staff to move around more freely and deal with customers in a more logical way,” Dell says. “I very rarely leave a voicemail; instead, I’ll flick an instant message to most of our vendors and customers who we federate with.” Being accessible to customers makes the difference.
“A voicemail is frustrating [but] it’s not hard to respond to an instant message. You have to put it in a business context. If someone is looking to reengineer their business processes and said, ‘We’re stuck in the 1990s; if we were to [install UC], how would that be?’ You have to be able to drill down to the feature level and [show how] it will increase service levels to customers.”
Better deal for resellers
On the other side of many UC deals is a customer who wants to lease the solution. Even if the hardware is on-premise, they expect to expense it, says Westcon UC vendor manager Dan Meadows.
“If you take a phone system and bundle calls and lines and lease the whole thing back, and the customer doesn’t own it, they have a monthly cost and they can track that out for five to 15 years,” Meadows says.
In March, Westcon pioneered a value-added distribution project with UC vendor Avaya where they assemble a package through Westcon’s leasing arm that solutions providers can resell.
“The current model is we’re the distributor with the box, who moves it to the reseller, and it’s up to the reseller to come up with the leasing option and do all the account management,” Meadows says.
“We had a presentation from our [North American] leasing arm and it looks like it stacks up. We’ve gauged customer feedback and the response has been really positive.”
Meadows expects the leasing service to launch before the second half of the year in New Zealand before possibly rolling out in Australia. Westcon distributes UC gear from Avaya, Jabber, AudioCodes, Acme Packet (Oracle), Polycom, and New Zealand videoconferencing start-up FaceMe.
Meadows says Westcon is “exceptionally lucky” to have invested early in consumption-based platforms, including cloud, and to have a mature services department throughout the Asia-Pacific.
“We don’t just lick a stamp and put it on a box; the business is always looking for ways to diversify. The leasing arm is a perfect example of out of the box thinking.
“If we don’t climb the value chain ahead of [resellers] we’ll fall behind. The pace of distribution has changed massively in the past five years.”
Case study: Isaac Council & TAA Connect
With a local government footprint covering an area of 58,862 km2, the Isaac Council of Western Central Queensland has a wider landmass than half of Europe’s countries. But with just 22,650 residents, its population density is less than the Western Sahara. And with Brisbane 1,000 km to the south and Mackay an hour’s drive, getting help and staffing are constant challenges.
The sparsely populated area had administrative problems, issues that Queensland communication integrator TAA Connect solved with a UC solution crafted from NEC, Enghouse Systems and Zeacom.
“[Council] has sites at least 100 km from each other and it’s very hard to get staff out there,” says Peter Scheimer, sales manager of TAA Connect, which was No.35 in the 2014 CRN Fast50 after growing 26.5 percent to hit a turnover of $7.5 million. “We implemented a system on a single IP platform and routed calls intelligently between the sites.”
Presence alerts the network to route a call to the next available agent if someone walks away from their desk, for instance, which boosts productivity and customer service. “The main thing for the council was to answer calls efficiently and quickly regardless of the site and provide a single number [to contact] available people with the right skills.” TAA Connect rents a solution to the council, saving it up to $30,000 a month, he says.
While the equipment is on-premise, the reseller remotely manages it as part of a managed service. Wireless bridges some remote locations and outside lines were retained for redundancy and in the case of disaster.
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