Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

I ventured into the office for the first time in a long time recently and I noticed just how different working in the office is compared to working from home.

Firstly there is no privacy. Alone in my home office, I can take any call or Teams meeting at my desk without being overheard or disturbed. In the office, you need to pre-book a meeting room to do this.

Secondly, there are a lot of interruptions in the office. People at your desk catching up, making coffee or pulling you into impromptu meetings. On the plus side, you do get to hear what is going on in other departments in real-time. There is an energy in the office which is positive, encouraging and welcoming. Challenges can be resolved very quickly with the right people around a desk in just a few minutes. You get a better perspective of what is going on across the whole business in the office. You can read people a lot better in person and pick your moment better.

In the heart of the office you can visually see the culture. 'Customer First' as phones are answered and emails replied to as a priority. The way the team collaborates to assist partners and support them. Training people from home has been great to a degree. We can teach the job, processes, and systems but culture is something that needs to be observed and absorbed I think.

I read a piece on LinkedIn recently which said that working from home can be damaging as you learn from others and it is easier to do this in an office environment working closely with experts.

I do find that I get a lot more work done at home, working longer hours with no travelling time and fewer interruptions.

At Jola, we have implemented a flexible working policy. Some teams choose to be in the office every day, others 3 days a week and some prefer to work remotely. We are aware of some of the benefits and challenges and hope we have found the right balance.

In a recent partner satisfaction survey, Jola scored a Net Promoter Score of 56, which categorises the company as ‘great’, with 41% of Jola partners giving them 10/10 and 96% scoring them 7 or higher. In the comments section, Jola partners praised Jola products, pricing, portals and service.

Andrew Dickinson, Jola CEO, commented, ‘I am delighted with our NPS. We now have over 1000 resellers and MSPs choosing Jola as their mobile data and intelligent connectivity partner. Our relentless product development continues with a long list of new products designed to help partners differentiate their offerings and win bigger deals. We have a fully redundant highly scalable IP edge network with DDoS protection from Cloudflare, and we continue to grow and invest in people, products, platforms and processes. We have a fantastic team here at Jola who are dedicated to supporting our growing partner base and it was great to see so many of them named in the survey by partners.”

Recurring revenue businesses rely heavily on customer retention. It is tempting to focus all efforts on recruitment, but churning customers is a real concern for growing businesses.

Understanding and monitoring customer experience, can help to identify early warning signs, put in measures and reduce churn. By improving the customer experience, you can increase customer retention and revenue per customer, whilst also enhancing brand perceptions in the marketplace. By getting this process right, you create ‘fans’ of your business, ‘advocates’ who freely recommend your services to others and buy frequently from you.

In order to measure customer experience, you must first identify relevant KPIs. What are the measures in your business of customer satisfaction? Many companies use NPS (Net Promoter Score) which gives an overall satisfaction score. You ask the question: How likely are you to recommend us? You use an answer scale of one to ten. You may also want to ask more granular questions to understand satisfaction across each customer touch point.

Next think about what influences the satisfaction score. This can often be obtained through a comments box on your survey, or by calling a cross-section of clients to ask specific questions about their experience. Having the right products, at the right price, on the right management portals, is key, combined with excellent service and accurately and timely billing.

By surveying customers regularly and gathering feedback, you can identify any shortcomings and work with customers to improve them. Going the extra mile to fix a problem can save a churning customer, and when handled well, also turn them into an advocate.

Microsoft Teams saw a huge uptick in users during the pandemic, adding 95 million users in 2020. It currently has 145 million daily active users. Over 500,000 organisations use Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform, however their calling plans are basic and do not include call recording, which creates an exciting new opportunity for the channel.

Jola is a wholesale SIP provider offering SIP and PSTN replacement services to the channel. We developed an automated Direct Routing Solution, giving Teams users a cost-effective and feature-rich alternative to Microsoft Calling Plans, which now includes Teams Call Recording.

Our Teams Call Recording solution offers partners policy-based call recording with flexible and secure controls. Our users are able to record both one-to-one and group Teams meetings automatically storing recordings for up to 7 years.  Our solution is fully configurable and managed within our portal providing partners with a lucrative new revenue stream.

Jola

Jola is an award-winning, channel-only supplier of business communications, specialising in mobile data SIMs. Jola was one of the first channel companies in the UK to launch Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams. Since then we have added many new features.

When we started Jola over 8 years ago, we didn’t have any offices, we were using our own laptops and it made sense for us to run a paperless office and share documents in the cloud. As we grew, we retained this ethos and developed it by implementing re-use then re-cycle processes for hardware internally and for kit sent to customers.

Using Microsoft Teams as a substitute for face-to-face meetings in many cases, we have reduced our carbon footprint and our overheads and still managed to achieve our high growth targets.

Over 500,000 organisations use Microsoft Teams as their default messaging platform, however their calling plans are basic and do not include call recording, which creates an exciting new opportunity for the channel.

Jola is a wholesale SIP provider offering SIP and PSTN replacement services to the channel. We developed an automated Direct Routing Solution, giving Teams users a cost-effective and feature-rich alternative to Microsoft Calling Plans, which now includes Teams Call Recording.

Direct Routing provides a PSTN solution for the Microsoft Teams Phone System. It allows users to make and receive UK and international calls to, and from, non-Teams users, without needing a hosted telephony system or PBX. We offer unlimited local call packages in 50+ countries. Jola’s Direct Routing comes with a comprehensive management portal called SIP Manager and offers a cost-effective alternative to Microsoft’s Calling Plan. Resellers can automatically provision key components of Direct Routing without needing to install Microsoft PowerShell.

Jola is a multi-award-winning mobile data aggregator, which means we offer services from all the major UK networks and hundreds of networks globally. We sell a wide range of options, including Fixed IP and Private APN, and we are a well-established, channel-only company. On average, we launch two new products and product extensions every month, so you will always have a differentiated offering and avoid being commoditised. We have our own IP addresses and number ranges, and our superfast HA network runs over Cloudflare, the world’s #1 DDOS protection company. We operate in many different vertical markets with market-leading specialists, so we understand the specific needs of each vertical and can help you productise your proposition. We give you complete control over your global SIM estate with Mobile Manager, which has been developed over eight years into an award-winning, market leading portal. If you choose, your customers can also have access to our white-label portal so they can see directly how much data they are using in each device and make decisions accordingly. We help you uncover opportunities and win them with solutions end users just cannot buy from anyone else. Our objective is to help you reduce churn, increase ARPU and improve the overall value of your business.

Scale

It's so scalable. Jola activated 10,000 SIMs in ten minutes for one of our partners and they didn't have to add any more people in billing or accounts to support the project. SIMs provision immediately using our Mobile Manager platform, so you don’t have to wait months to start generating recurring margins. As soon as customers put SIMs into devices, you’re billing them. Mobile Manager gives you total control to pause, swap, upgrade or cease SIMs in real-time. Mobile Manager is connected to the networks in real-time with instant alerts and triggers, so you can manage cost, maximise margin, and keep your customers happy.

Margin

People think mobile data is very low revenue and you have to win hundreds of thousands. You don't. You can often get a decent ARPU of £10 to £15 on thousands of devices and sometimes margins in excess of 40%, so it's a really attractive line-of-business to pivot into.

Winning deals

We help you uncover opportunities and win them with solutions end users just cannot buy from anyone else. We have a six-step process to help you go from a standing start to building a very profitable recurring revenue stream from mobile data.

Summary

There is high demand for mobile data from your existing customers. It is an easy product to sell, provision, support and bill. We have partners who have doubled the value of their business, increased their ARPU and reduced churn by focusing on mobile data.

Your customers are working on mobile data projects right now. If you get this right, you will quickly generate high margin recurring revenue and, due to higher EBITDA multiples for mobile data, increase the value of your company. Your mobile data partner will need to give you the tools to win these deals, usually competing with the direct sales arms of the mobile networks. Your supplier will need to be an aggregator with access to all the networks. Ideally they will also be an independent MVNO, providing access to all the UK mobile networks and hundreds of operators globally. Most importantly everything must be automated, with real-time APIs offering zero-touch provisioning and management through a single self-service portal. They will need to be innovative, with a constant stream of relevant mobile data and IoT products that the networks would take years to develop and launch. Mobile data is easy to sell, support and bill, when you partner with the right channel supplier.

Real-time Management Portal

When we first started working on major mobile data bids with our partners, none of the tenders even mentioned self-service portals. Today nearly 30% include parent-child online management panels as a minimum requirement. 

It’s no surprise that we see this change primarily in second generation projects. End user companies that have rolled out multi-site IoT/M2M deployments have found them impossible to manage manually. From capacity management to usage and fault diagnosis, everything is so much easier with real-time control. 

When these projects come up for renewal the need for a comprehensive portal moves from Desired to Essential. With specialist third party bid consultants involved in helping companies write tenders, this is only going to increase.

According to McKinsey, revenues from mobile data are set to increase dramatically over the next five years. Factors driving growth are the availability, speed and reliability of 4G, 5G and Internet of Things (IoT). Fortune Business Insights predict this market will be worth £1085 billion by 2027.

The opportunity for the channel is significant. We may not find ourselves supplying car manufacturers with SIMs for self-driving cars, but ICT resellers already have strong relationships with business customers for IT infrastructure, asset tracking, digital signage, mobile WiFi, monitoring and utilities.

Mobile data is an easy product to sell and provision and needs very little support. Jola took on just under 200 new partners in 2021 and now has over 1000. COVID-related projects fuelled early demand but these temporary revenue streams were quickly dwarfed as our partners’ customers started to look at mobile data projects they had on the back burner. We recently put 30,000 multinetwork SIMs into iPads for one of our partners’ public sector projects.

In the channel we are seeing an exponential rise in demand for mobile data SIMs and not only for use in 5G/4G routers, pre-Ethernet connectivity and Ethernet back-up. Mobile data SIMs are being fitted into signage, gaming machines, vending machines, monitoring devices, sensors and ATMs as standard. SIMs are being used in wind and solar farms, measuring and tracking key variables.  They are also used in smart TV cameras, which roam internationally. Everyday manufacturers and service companies are finding new uses for mobile data and, as we accelerate towards 5G, this is unlikely to slow down.

1. With 4G+ download speeds around 300Mb/s available to 90%+ of the population, mobile data is now a credible alternative to fixed line, as well as a great 100% SLA, backup story. It is also the only practical solution to replace millions of PSTN lines in the next few years. Only around 20% of resellers sell mobile data but by 2025 every reseller in the UK will have to have it in their portfolio. As is always the case with disruptive technological change, early movers win more market share and ringfence their customers from competitors.
   
2. Every reseller/MSP has at least one significant IoT/M2M opportunity in their existing base of customers, and mobile data aggregators like Jola are helping to find and win them. Resellers need experienced hands-on support with key customers, so the only practical option is channel-only suppliers, with a proven track record and robust processes.
   
3. The financial markets value mobile data EBITDA at least twice the multiple of fibre and broadband. With self-service, fully automated portals like Mobile Manager, it is easy to sell, manage and bill.

4. Mobile data is more than just IoT. Vendors offering too few options and no control will fail to connect with the thousands of resellers trying to develop differentiated and converged solutions for their customers.
   

 Jola

Jola is a mobile data aggregator and MVNO, which means that we offer services from all major UK networks and hundreds of networks globally. We have been selling mobile data to the channel since 2014, and we understand our partners’ pain points and the needs of their end-users in each vertical market. Over time, we have developed a unique portal that gives you the control and visibility you need to manage global SIM estates – control you can even extend to your customers. We have also developed unique hardware solutions that save our partners time, helping them create a great customer experience, maximise their margins and minimise costs for their customers.