Jola Cloud Solutions' Blog

How important is price?

Price to partners is important because this is a competitive market and resellers need to win the business at a decent margin. If you look for providers that have invested in automation you will generally find them cheaper because their operating costs are lower. They may also be easier to do business with and delivery may be quicker and more predictable. Most SMEs still just need the basics, which most platforms do, and some of the advanced features are still a bit niche. Of course it is possible to get ‘free’ seats if you’re prepared to use self-developed, freeware platforms but most resellers have ditched this idea because of reliability, security and product roadmap issues. Now that hosted voice has moved out of the early adopter phase, the trend is towards established brands, low upfront costs and fixed monthly rentals for everything, including calls, over longer term contracts.

Has the connectivity issue disappeared?

Not entirely. FTTC has really helped but still doesn’t reach around 40% of businesses. ADSL2+ is better than its predecessors but with limited upstream speeds you have to be careful with how many simultaneous calls you are trying to support.

The research

The Swan Independent Research survey of August 2014 randomly sampled 20,000 UK SMEs. In the sample 85% of SMEs had fewer than 50 employees and 62% fewer than 20. The survey showed that 54% of respondents used a local communications supplier and 48% said that they were influenced by a local supplier when it came to making purchasing decisions for communications products and services. 22% would get references from other SMEs and 55% said a primary source of information in any decision was the web. 78% of MDs were involved in the buying process – 47% from the start.

One could therefore conclude that where no in-house expertise exists, the MD will often lead a project themselves, guided by trusted suppliers, web research and peer recommendation.

Steps to take

So what steps can you take to appear on the radar of customers and prospects investigating a move to cloud applications? Getting a decent web site and good referrals is obvious, but how do you know if you are a trusted supplier? Maybe ask yourself;

Hunt groups allows users within a group to be included in a specified sub-group to handle incoming calls received by an assigned phone number. Group administrators can choose from any of the following schemes, each of which rings the specified phones in a different manner:

• Circular – sends calls in a fixed order. The call is sent to the first available person on the list, beginning where the last call left off.
• Regular – sends calls to users in the order listed by an administrator. Incoming calls go to the first available person on the list, always starting with the first person on the list.
• Simultaneous–rings all of the users in the group simultaneously; the first user to pick up the ringing phone is connected.
• Uniform – as a call is completed, the user moves to the bottom of the call queue in a shuffling fashion. The next incoming call goes to the user who has been idle the longest. If a user receives a call that was not directed to them through the hunt group, the call is not included in the receiving order for uniform calls.

One in three employees are guilty of not using up their annual leave and those who do go away often remain online, still checking and replying to work emails. Thanks to cloud computing with the ability to access not just your email, but your documents, CRM and billing platform from your mobile as well as using the mobile client for your hosted telephony, it is getting worse.

Taking holiday is important for both staff and businesses. Work can at times be all-consuming, so it’s understandable that workers find it hard to switch off and for many, the fear of falling behind on their workload whilst on holiday is enough to keep them in the office. However, those running a business need to have processes in place that encourage annual leave, otherwise staff could burnout. How many of these steps do you take in your business for example?

1 - Encourage annual leave

First and foremost, as a business you need to foster a positive message about annual leave and engrain it into your company culture so that employees don’t feel guilty about taking time off. Instead encourage staff to take a break and promote the importance of unwinding and leaving the office behind. You could also use annual leave as an incentive for reaching targets.

2 - Put simple processes in place

Your business should make the process of booking holiday easy. Make sure handover processes are also in place, so that your staff don’t have to worry that their workload is piling up in their absence; this could be achieved through a team meeting, via email, or both, so that their team is aware of what needs to be done. Similarly, activating ‘out of office’ responses helps employees relax that bit more, as they know that urgent enquiries will be picked up by someone else.

Hoteling

Hoteling allows users to log in to a guest profile on a shared phone. Once users have logged in to their guest profile, the shared phone acts exactly like their own phone—all their network features, phone number(s), and dial plan capabilities are available on the shared phone. This is of use if you have a hot desk in your office used by many.

Shared call appearance

Shared Call Appearance (SCA) offers the user the opportunity to run several devices (e.g. mobile app, handset, softphone) on the same extension, usually with no additional charge. The user’s profile is cloned on each device so they behave identically. For example, when switched on all devices will ring at the same time and Busy Lamp Field (BLF) settings will be identical. Calls cannot be transferred between shared devices and devices cannot call each other.

‘Connectivity’ is an ugly word but the easiest term for the communications industry to describe the physical media we use to communicate with each other. So why not use terms like broadband, internet, Ethernet, leased line or ADSL and what about ISDN, GSM, GPRS and 4G? 

The need for more granular definitions depends on the audience. The SME generally doesn’t care if its Fibre Ethernet, EFM, EoFTTC, 4G, ADSL or white magic. They just want to send and receive information as quickly and as reliably as possible. On the other hand, the industry, and the channel in particular, is obsessed with learning and explaining the nuances between technologies even if their customer isn't interested. After all what’s the point of knowing all this stuff if you can’t use it to differentiate your proposition? Some suppliers even make up new names to describe their connectivity and further confuse their customers.

So the answer is that when you are talking to the channel you have to use generic terms like connectivity for fear of the pedants seeking you out and ridiculing your simplicity. “Internet access? What if my customer wants a P2P leased line or an MPLS network without breakout?” In communicating with end customers I think a different approach is needed. Find out what they can get before you contact them and certainly before you product-dump every technology and associated features. Ask them questions about what they think they need and uncover problems so that you can suggest things they didn’t know they needed.

Openreach recently reported that over 25 million homes and businesses can now access up to 80Mb/s Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) superfast broadband. 19 million premises were connected in the first roll out in 2014, at a cost of £2.5bn.

Ultrafast 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) is also said to be available to over 200,000+ UK premises and there are plans to roll out next generation hybrid fibre technology with download speeds of around 300Mb/s by 2020.

The opportunity

As a trusted supplier of services to UK SMEs you may be asked to advise on connectivity available as customers consider upgrading. Typical customers are start-ups looking to set up their first office, growing businesses moving to bigger premises and SMEs considering cloud-hosted applications such as hosted voice.

During our business careers we forge many partnerships, have you ever thought about why some are so much more successful than others?

Trust

This is non-negotiable. It also needs to be unreserved, unambiguous, and unequivocal. Trust is one of those things that is easy to advertise but a lot more difficult to demonstrate and retain over a long period of time. It is doing what you say you are going to do. It is coming to an agreement and honouring it. It is having contracts that are clear and concise and don’t hide any surprising clauses. It is about trusting someone with your end users, helping you demonstrate products and win new business.

Shared vision

Sharing a vision such as a passion for customer service is important. On a day to day basis it is about having someone to contact and support you, answer queries so you can get back to a customer in a timely fashion. Someone who takes calls after hours like you do, to go the extra mile for your customers. Someone who isn’t dictated to by strict processes and scripts who can help you customise a solution and expedite delivery to meet expectations where possible.

One of my better decisions in 1996 was to come home from the USA and after 10 happy years with C&W leave in favour of a port-a-cabin start-up on a chicken farm in Leicester. These days the cloud has enabled companies to start-up with little capital investment, renting enterprise-level applications on monthly contracts and allowing staff to work from anywhere. If you can live on your savings for a few months you may even be able to get going without having to sell any of your company to external investors. Reduced start-up costs could be one reason why there were a record 608,100 UK startups in 2015, up 4.5% on the previous year which was itself a record year.

If you are considering taking the plunge, breaking away from corporate life and having a go at working for yourself there will be many thoughts occupying your mind right now so let me add one more.

What kind of entrepreneur are you?

1. Lifestyle

This entrepreneur has turned something they love doing, into a business. They have no immediate plans to sell the business which exists primarily to fund their lifestyle. If they are doing well they will be approached by people who tell them they could be millionaires by expanding, getting new investors or preparing the business for sale. After several months of stress and expense it fizzles out and the lifestyle entrepreneur breathes a sigh of relief. I know many lifestyle entrepreneurs who have learned to be comfortable in their own shoes and resist encouragement to expand or recruit. If you are one, you probably know you are not attractive to professional investors because they need an exit to return a gain to their fund in a specific period. If you need money for growth or new equipment, then borrow it. Interest rates are low and most banks are happy to lend you money if you will give them a personal guarantee. There is also a government-backed scheme, offering loans of up to £25,000 at 6% interest.

Recent research from YouGov suggests that there is now a 50/50 split in mobile users on contract and SIM-only deals in stark contrast to the previous year where only 16% of contracts were SIM-only. Both types of deals have grown in the last five years however SIM-only deals have grown the most. Since 2010 the percentage of phone owners with contracts has decreased from 80% to 67%.