Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

Adding new products and services to your portfolio can be challenging. What is the current demand? What products should I add? How much will I sell? What price should I sell at? At what margin? Who should I partner with? How do I manage the billing and technical support?

Dealer Model

Many companies start on a dealer model with their chosen supplier to get a feel for demand, packages and pricing. They work with suppliers on marketing campaigns, often taking suppliers with them to customer meetings and using the quoting and ordering tools available. Billing and technical support are managed by the supplier with dealers receiving regular commission/margin share.

Reseller Model

Moving from a dealer to a reseller model provides better control and improved margins, however resellers need to manage their own contracts, materials, billing and support. For those that don’t already have the necessary resource in-house it can be costly and risky to hire and train new staff to support a product, which may never make it to core product status. Using a generic 3^rd party support service is an option but there are set-up costs and you pay for calls by the minute. If your new platform is unreliable or generates early-life calls, the first month charges could wipe out 12 months margin.

Existing suppliers

The most qualified and experienced technical support teams use the products themselves and already support them for end-users of channel partners nationwide. They already operate a UK-based call centre 24/7 and may well offer a white label service.

Jola White Label Technical Support

Jola offers resellers experienced technical support for JolaPhone customers with a non-geographic telephone number and a customised email address. Resellers can advertise contact details to their end customers and forward callers directly to us via an option on their auto-attendant. Our white label support is billed at a fixed amount per seat per month, which is cost-effective and manageable rather than the per minute alternatives. We offer full product and platform training for technical support teams, when the time is right to move technical support in-house.

To find out more…