1 – Selling dial tone alone isn’t sustainable and managed selling is the new black

Mark Vale, Founder of Commsverse, says that selling dial tone alone isn’t sustainable and hasn’t been for at least five years. Vendors struggling with margin and share of the market must do something different to remain relevant. This will likely mean adding a full suite of peripheral services to their base platform.

Mark also mentioned that some vendors confuse this with reselling. A key trend in the future, but also happening now, is what he terms “managed selling”.

2 – Managed and professional services will create differentiation

Tom Arbuthnot, Founder of Empowering.Cloud, sees potential market dominance causing service providers to expand their portfolios to stand out.

With industry analysts and consultancy firms all earmarking Microsoft, Cisco, and Zoom as the leaders in UCaaS for 2024 (the exact same as 2023), expect these brands to win in 2025 too.

The opportunity here, however, is for service providers to extend the functionality of these platforms and bring everything under one roof.

3 – White glove plus automated provisioning is a must for enterprise support

Dom Black, Head of Growth at Cavell, points out that as your target customer increases in size, and you reach enterprise level, a white glove approach is more favorable for initial roll out.

There’s an expectation that you walk through requirements one-by-one. Each department may have unique needs that need manual changes that you can’t pre-program.

However, you’re still expected to provide these types of automation to avoid manual moves, adds, and changes en masse. Otherwise, you’re reliant on busy IT engineers never putting a finger wrong.

💡💡 On average, an enterprise affected by 120 provisioning errors in one month could end up losing more than $25,000 in lost employee productivity. That’s on top of the cost to IT.

Put into perspective, imagine an enterprise in an industry that traditionally experiences high turnover. Each new user, or move, add, and change, could contribute to costs spiralling out of control.

As providers of services like call center reporting and CRM integration, we often see service provider prioritization of automation over things like:

• Attach rate
• Cost of unit production
• Value chain and branding
• Risk assessment and sharing
• Line of business systems integration

Take a look at your 2025 portfolio and see what’s the obvious use case for automation.

4 – Go-to-market plans will need numerous selling points

Dominic Kent, Founder and Lead Marketer at UC Marketing, says having a “unique” selling point is no longer enough. As the market becomes more crowded and even more “me too” solutions and vendors appear, standing out will become harder than ever.

Before you even get into a customer sales cycle, you’ve got to do something different to get their attention. This isn’t cheap gimmicks or catchy advertising. Instead, it must be a well-stocked portfolio that caters to prospects every need.

5 – A huge opportunity for the informal contact center

Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, says, “There’s a huge untapped market opportunity by selling beyond the walls of the formal contact center to the “informal” or “casual” contact center.”

In her article, The Informal Contact Center Opportunity, Blair concludes,

While there’s no limitation to what you can add to your portfolio, we’re keen to point out the three major technologies customers need more often than not.

1 – Call analytics

With every call your customers make or receive, they produce a data record on the back end phone system. Without a formal reporting suite, it’s extremely hard to work out what any of this data means.

That’s fine for a small part of your customer base. But, really, what business doesn’t want to be powered by data to influence better business decisions?

With comprehensive analytics, businesses get a full view of their call spend, average handle times, whether they’re hitting their service levels, and much much more.

You can feed these reports into workforce management systems and make changes to rotas and staffing levels. You might even help a customer introduce new channels or self-service.

Whatever the data, transform the way they translate it and use it to make genuine decisions for their business.

2 – CRM integration

The combining of telephony platforms and CRM is a process that makes total sense. They’re often the two most used software in any business.

If your customers are customer-facing themselves, they’ve got customer records. The more detail they have on them, the better and faster they can serve them. But a CRM is no good if the phone system is a barrier to entry.

Integrating a CRM with a UCaaS platform means you shortcut all the hassle in between phone systems and CRM. Instead of a disjointed experience, where you feel like you’re causing an inconvenience, integration introduces a number of benefits:

• Less duplication and reduced potential for error: When data gets shared between systems in real time, humans don’t need to double type or copy and paste.
• More personalized customer experiences: Call center agents have access to past interaction history and can recall key events and transactions.
• Fewer clicks and less chance of misdialing: For outbound campaigns, use click to dial directly from CRM records or web pages.
• Enhanced data security and compliance: Fewer transfers of data between platforms means there’s low risk of duplication, misinformation, and data leakage.

As a direct result, your customers’ customer receives a more efficient and overall better experience, leading to higher renewal rates and low churn.

3 – Call recording

Call recording is no longer a one-and-done thing for call centers concerned with making sure their agents follow the right script. Today, call recording comes complete with transcription, sentiment analysis, and contextual search.

This means businesses can use the words, feelings, and tones from their customer calls to leverage insights about the customer experience they’re providing. Like call analytics, this information can influence business decisions around workflows, call flows, and even staff training.

By partnering with Oak, Akixi brings to market one of the globally leading fully certified call

recording solutions for Microsoft Teams and other UCaaS platforms.

The product conforms with all major regulatory requirements, including:

• FCA
• PCI-DSS
• MiFID II
• Dodd-Frank
• GDPR
• HIPAA

It’s also call routing agnostic. This means it’s compatible with Microsoft Call Plans, Direct Routing, Operator, Connect and Microsoft certified Contact Center solutions as well as other leading platforms like BroadSoft.

What the majority of customers really need is a single provider of all their telecom services.

You only achieve this with a complete portfolio. In 2025 and beyond, the most successful service providers will still sell basic dial tone licenses. But these will be packaged alongside call recording, call analytics, and CRM integration.

Don’t get bogged down as a reseller. 

Transform your portfolio and become a genuine service provider.