Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

There isn’t a single supplier in the UK voice and data industry that owns and operates 100% of the infrastructure on which their products and services depend. The emergence of the cloud has encouraged many centres of excellence to flourish and interconnect. This enables channel suppliers like Jola to knit best-of-breed suppliers together with software and service wraps to match the needs of our resellers and dealers. However, this approach brings with it unique challenges in support and incident management.

How quickly are you notified?

Should an incident occur, you need to know what the problem is and how long it will take to be fixed. You want to be on the front foot, pro-actively contacting your customers with detailed communications regarding the incident. If all suppliers in the chain do not have a well thought-through incident management process, a wave of dissatisfied end-user customers will quickly build, with the last reseller in the chain taking the brunt of the criticism. Organisations not used to dealing with the channel may not understand the imperative for fast, accurate information. Those that are not channel-only will often prioritise their direct customers over their channel partners.

How should it be done?

Ideally incidents are categorised by priority. We use the UTIL guidelines categorising incidents by impact and urgency, P1, P2 etc. Suppliers need to get the initial communication out to customers within the first 30 minutes (we aim for 15) explaining the issue. It is important to have clear communication between the engineers working on the problem and the support team managing calls and communications. Updates need to be at least hourly. Communication paths need to be established in advance between suppliers and departments for effective updates.

Jola recently exhibited at Channel Live at the NEC. It was a great opportunity for IT and Telecoms providers to compare suppliers side-by-side. For Jola, the event was a success as we achieved the targets we set. How do you measure the effectiveness of your sales and marketing?

Do you use these measures?

Key marketing metrics are leads generated, conversion rates and spend against budget. Brand awareness, product and messaging recall and customer satisfaction indexes are also useful. For sales, it is revenue and margin against target across the portfolio, as well as growing active partners. Effective sales and marketing teams will regularly achieve targets set in line with the business plan.

What are the must-haves?

When partners ask us about setting up new sales and marketing campaigns for our products, we start by looking at objectives and targets to measure success against. As a starting point partners need the right products at the right price to support their customers and want appropriate self-service portals and white label services. They want a reliable supplier, who will work with them to fix problems and help their customers improve productivity and save money.

Materials

Next they need materials to help generate new leads, information to populate their web site and customer newsletters. They want detailed sales proposals, explaining key benefits with more in-depth technical information available on request.

Resellers looking to add hosted voice to their portfolio often feel that hosted voice propositions are all the same. Is this the case?

Inclusive Features

Each supplier packages their offering differently. Some have stripped out basic features to offer an attractive headline price.  When you start to add key features back in, you may see a very different price per seat. Others have bundled in all the common features and have competitive add-ons to customise offerings. In either case it is important to know what your customers expect as standard and what options they are willing to pay for. 

Free Calls

Which suppliers include free calls to UK landlines and mobiles? Is this something your potential customers will require? Is there a licence-only price without calls? Are you able to pool allowances across customer sites and what happens when an individual user or customer exceeds the Fair Use Policy?

Call Director

What happens if your customers lose internet connectivity or power? Can customers dial out from their mobiles? This is a useful benefit for customers concerned about reliability. Some suppliers offer an ‘Anywhere’ feature so you are never without a phone system.

If you sell mobile SIM cards to SMEs, you may have customers calling in, wanting to activate, cease, bar or swap SIM cards. You have sent an email to the appropriate supplier and have repeatedly checked for a response. You have then called to chase your email and are having target response rates explained to you. In the meanwhile, you are being chased by your customer, who is questioning their importance to you as a customer.

If you had a management portal, you could make changes during the phone call. With real-time APIs, the actions could complete whilst you are still on the phone. Better still you can grant the customer access to be able to manage this themselves.

Mobile Manager is an online management portal for ordering and managing estates of mobile data SIMs. The portal communicates with Vodafone and O2 networks, enabling partners to create customers, manage activations and instantly control SIM swaps, bars, ceases, tariff changes and bolt-ons.

Air2Air wanted to make helipads part of the helicopter. They developed a solar-powered lighting system controlled by an application, which allowed the pilot to turn the lights on before take-off. The helipad can be built on concrete or grass and is designed to control debris from hitting the helicopter.

They needed a way for the application to communicate with the helipad in situations where hard-wiring the system to the internet is impractical. Air2Air choose JolaMobile data SIMs as they exactly met the requirements, were cost effective and easy to manage. Through Mobile Manager they were able to pause, swap and upgrade SIMs remotely whereas other alternatives required physical intervention.

Jola are productising simple IoT solutions using JolaMobile SIMs. We developed Mobile Manager for partners and their end users to be able to set up alerts and add bolt-ons as required. We also have fixed IP SIMs in the pipeline on Vodafone and O2 networks.

Jola recently took part in a live, streamed hosted telephony debate with two other suppliers.

The debate raised some interesting points.

Connectivity

Companies of all sizes are moving to hosted solutions, as they are more cost-effective. Concerns about reliability of internet connections has largely gone away, due to the availability of fast, reliable circuits such as FTTC and EFM.

If the government gets behind it, 5G could quickly start to take over from direct internet connections like ADSL2+, fibre broadband and Ethernet. 4G is already being used in areas of poor connectivity and there are portals available to monitor usage and reduce bill shock. 5G is a way off, but does present an opportunity for the channel and a threat to fixed-line carriers.

Choosing suppliers

There was some debate around how many current hosted voice suppliers there are in the market, however the point was made that there is a huge choice of suppliers and solutions to choose from. When you compare solutions, there are big differences, even between vendors using the same underlying technology e.g. Broadsoft. Resellers require different levels of support and companies that can infill requirements on demand, such as white label billing, support, installations and portals have an advantage.

Planning

Arguably the most important stage. Consider your objectives. Why are you exhibiting? What do you hope to achieve? How much do you have to spend? What is your expected return on investment? How does this break down into leads, conversions and predicted future revenues?

Take the time to read the exhibitors manual to understand what you can and can’t do, what’s included in your package and the early bird deadlines. It’s a good idea to start planning early.

Plan your stand for maximum impact. Are your competitors exhibiting? Have you considered your USPs and how you may compare? What do you want to promote? How are you planning to catch the attention of visitors? The answers to these questions will help you shape your key messaging.

Brand your stand to stand out for all the right reasons. Plan meeting areas and think about how visitor data will be collected. Are you bringing your own equipment or do you need to hire any? Do you have any storage on the stand and is it lockable?

Once you have designed your stand and ordered equipment and materials, book hotels.

Office UC is an application which allows you to make voice and video calls over the JolaPhone network via a softphone which is available to download on a PC, phone or tablet.  It comes as standard as part of Jola Premium Broadsoft hosted telephony bundles.

What is UC Team?

UC Team is an option which also includes conference calls and the ability to share your desktop for collaborative working.

How do I make and receive calls?

Calls are made and received via the application, as if you were sat at your desk using your handset. You have the option to call from the app, call from your IP phone or video call. You can easily access your voicemail from the dial pad too. You can mute callers and adjust the volume of the call, transfer calls, put callers on hold and show or hide video.

How do I manage calls?

Answer or decline calls by clicking the green or red buttons. If contacts are already in the directory you can see who is calling before you answer without having to recognise the number. Call waiting allows you to put one call on hold and answer another call. Calls can be transferred blind or attended if you need to brief a colleague before transferring a call. Call Move can be used where users have Shared Call Appearance or Call Director where active calls on a desk phone can be transferred seamlessly to a smartphone via the Call Pull button.

1 – What marketing support is available?

Our marketing support is tailored to meet the specific needs of each partner. Some partners are happy to download content from the portal for their website, flyers, adverts, e-casts and newsletters. Other partners ask for help tailoring the content to meet the needs of their audience. Partners with specific objectives request more detailed advice. With these partners, we arrange conference calls to understand business objectives and discuss marketing plans.  We follow up with ideas and work with partners to generate and close first opportunities.

2 – Can you provide feedback on materials in production?

Yes, the Jola marketing department will review materials and send feedback to help customise content as required. We approve the use of all Jola branding and are happy to provide advice on partner branded materials, such as proposals and campaigns.

As the deadline for GDPR approaches, what do we need to know and what action should we be taking?

What is GDPR?

General Data Protection Regulations that come into force in the UK on 25^th May 2018. Currently, the UK relies on the Data Protection Act 1998, but this will be superseded by the new legislation. It introduces tougher fines for non-compliance and breaches and gives people more say over what companies can do with their data.

Who does GDPR apply to?

‘Controllers’ and ‘processors’. The controller says how and why personal data is processed and the processor acts on the controller’s behalf. Essentially any UK business that controls or processes personal data. Controllers must ensure personal data is processed lawfully, transparently and for a specific purpose. Once that purpose is fulfilled and the data is no longer required, it should be deleted.

How do I get consent under the GDPR?

Consent must be an active, affirmative action by the data subject, rather than the passive acceptance under some current models that allow for pre-ticked boxes or opt-outs.

Controllers must keep a record of how and when an individual gave consent and that individual may withdraw their consent whenever they want. If your current model for obtaining consent doesn't meet these new rules, you will have to bring it up to scratch or stop collecting data under that model when the GDPR applies in 2018.