As a result, we are seeing considerable interest among service providers in enhancing their telephony platform portfolios with value-added services (VAS).
From my experience, there are some key points a service provider must consider when rolling out value-added services:
1. Be realistic about attach rate
The majority of value-added services have attach rates in the 10-20% range. However, in some exceptional circumstances, attach rates can be much higher. This is especially true when they are delivered as a managed service. At Akixi, we can advise on how to improve your attach rates significantly.
2. Unit cost of production
If your attach rate is in this 10-20% range, the cost of delivery of the service must be optimized.
You must ask yourself, do the vendors you are working with have a common platform for VAS delivery, and does this easily integrate into your customer workflow?
3. Automation
I could have included this in “unit cost of production”, but I feel it is important enough to call it out on its own.
Make sure that your VAS partners seamlessly integrate into your automation strategy and come with built-in automation capabilities for deploying and managing services. This is particularly crucial in the Microsoft Teams environment, where VAS solutions are still in their infancy regarding mass deployment.
4. Value chain and branding
Can your VAS partner support your value chain, including management at multiple levels, administration demarcation, and branding at various levels? Issues with the value chain and branding can compromise your service, potentially resulting in lower sales and market share.
5. Tenancy
Can your VAS provider deliver you a cloud-hosted dedicated instance for their service? Without this capability, you might encounter unwelcome upgrades that impact the customer experience. Additionally, can your VAS vendor provide a test instance for you to sanity check releases before going into production?
6. Risk sharing
Certain value-added services carry more speculative elements than others, so having a low-cost early deployment model is important. What are the initial costs associated with your VAS vendors? Are there hidden costs that come as the service scales? You should look closely as to whether their product can really meet your business goals.
