1 – Avoiding a race to the bottom on price

There are so many providers of unified comms services today that market saturation is a phrase we must come to terms with.

In response to increasing competition, the natural instinct for many providers has been to drop their prices.

The result? Lower margins, harder work to keep customers, and a strain to provide genuine value.

Discounts aren’t a point of differentiation. They’re a cheap (pun intended) plaster to cover up underlying problems.

Sure, there’s a time and a place for discounting (Black Friday, renewals, multi-purchases, etc.).

But what you really need to assess is how your existing retail price provides more value rather than lowering your costs.

2 – Keeping up with innovation

How much artificial intelligence (AI) have you seen in the last few years?

It’s everywhere:

• Call center agent on-screen assistance
• Speech to text transcription and translation
• Call recording with sentiment analysis
• IVR and call queue self-service
• Meeting summaries
• Predictive analytics
• Chatbots

All these examples of AI can be provided by someone you might call a competitor. You might not even know they’re a competitor, yet.

Outside of AI, the basic methods of communication have changed too. Businesses no longer rely on PSTN calling. There are many ways end users stay in touch with customers, contractors, and suppliers.

Internally, instant messaging and asynchronous chat has boomed. Externally, we can introduce federation to enable messaging between different organizations.

What’s more, we now have the possibility to track all of these types of interactions. Be it an internal call, PSTN call, or something that makes its way through your IVR, various call center agents, and multiple touchpoints, each data point gets tracked and compared in comprehensive analytics packages.

Technology has come a long way. Voice is no longer enough.

3 – Meeting customer expectations

It used to be the case that a platform with 99.999% uptime and a handful of customer testimonials was enough to meet expectations.

If you made a claim and a real-world customer backed it up, you were worth taking a chance on.

Today, customer expectations include:

• Add-on technology through a single vendor
• Published case studies with various use cases
• Automated provisioning and drag and drop configuration
• Holistic and drill-down views of analytics within their organization
• Seamless integration with CRMs and line of business apps
• Professional services and training documentation to help with onboarding

These are just the tip of the iceberg.

Even the internal customers (end users) of your customers have evolved their expectations. When a new member of staff joins a company, they demand single sign-on across apps and instant access to team members, documentation, and customers.

Everything must work perfectly and first time. Anything less is viewed as a failure.

4 – Providing genuine differentiation

When you ask 10 service providers what their unique selling point (USP) is, or what makes them different to other providers, you can bet at least half of them say the same thing:

• We’re customer-first
• 99.999% uptime
• We’re the cheapest
• White labelling
• Sustainability

These aren’t unique and they’re not differentiators. They’re table stakes.

With all these poor USPs in circulation, do you even need a USP to stand out?

In their book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, authors Al Ries and Jack Trout emphasize the importance of being first to market. According to them, it’s better to be first than to have a better product.

That’s just fine.

Only, if you’re reading this blog post, you’re not first to market and you do need to work on your product and value proposition.

A weak USP is no good either.

According to a study conducted by the International Journal of Research in Marketing, “Consumers might react either positively or negatively to recommendations based on weak USPs”.

In the VoIP and UCaaS industry, differentiation likely comes in the form of value added services.

Ask yourself this:

• What more can you do for your customer than the other providers competing for the business?

For the eagle-eyed among us, we’re keen on value added services providing at least one point of differentiation.

Here’s why we’re so bullish on them transforming how you market and sell to customers—and how you can win more deals.

Increase revenue streams

The more you can sell to a customer, the more revenue and margin you stand to make.

This isn’t breaking news. So why aren’t service providers taking advantage of the potential tools and services you could provide to your target customer?

Imagine a world where your VoIP seat deal turns into:

• Base level voice seat
• Call analytics
• Call recording
• CRM integration

That’s three extra revenue streams, all with potential for high margin.

The best news here? Your customers are likely buying these services already. Only, they’re getting them from different providers.

This doesn’t just mean you’re losing out on potential revenue. It also means they’ve got multiple providers to juggle when they could have a single point of contact.

Providing these value added services could make you extra revenue while doing your customers a productivity favor.

Strengthen market position

Remove yourself from the immediacy of a deal or an RFP deadline. Taking a step back to revise product portfolio and value proposition will pay dividends in the long term.

Sales and marketing teams often get caught up in hitting imaginary monthly goals that were set up without rhyme or reason.

🛑 Important: This doesn’t mean rebranding or a new website. It means refining what you sell, how you sell it, and who you sell it to. These activities may lead to updating your website. But don’t get sucked into colors, logos, and tag lines as part of this exercise.

Retain existing customers

As a rule of thumb, the more services you provide a customer, the less likely they are to seek a competitor.

Part of this, of course, is the relationship element. If you get on with a provider that you talk to regularly, you’re more likely to stay friends. Only a big bang activity, like a major outage or huge provisioning error will sour this.

Another key factor here is technology. More pertinently, the effort and risk associated with moving technology partners.

In the case of small businesses, they don’t have the internal resources to undertake migration after migration. For large enterprises, it’s not uncommon for a single tech implementation to take 18-24 months.

Providing high-quality, high-value, sticky services is a foolproof way to enhance your value proposition and win more clients.

So you’ve heard that value added services can transform your product portfolio and strengthen your position in the market.

The next step is to identify which services are right for your clients. Only you know the answer here. If you don’t, or even if you do, take another step back and review your target audience.

Developing buyer personas is one thing. Getting out there and interviewing customers will give you first-hand insights into the real problems and needs of genuine customers.

Once you’ve done this, choose from some or all of these value added services:

CRM integration

Features like Caller Preview, Contact Popping, Call Activity Logging and Related Data are provided through our easy-to-use desktop application.

Caller Preview
Search the integrated CRM for callers info when you make or receive a call, and “preview” the details in a “toast” pop up.

Contact Popping
Allow users to “pop” caller’s records within the integrated CRM from a live call or directory.

Call Activity Logging
Manually or automatically create an activity record of a call received within the integrated CRM and allows addition of notes.

Related Data
Display additional insights like related company information, open support tickets, or other relevant CRM records directly in the interface. This feature provides a holistic view of the customer, enabling better-informed conversations and quicker resolutions.

Deployment is as simple as a few clicks per user. You can choose to hide the interface or make it front and center, depending on the softphone interface you’re using.

Akixi supports integration with 300+ CRMs across the following UC platforms:

• Avaya
• Cisco BroadWorks
• Cisco Webex
• Intermedia Ascend
• Intermedia Elevate
• Ericsson LG
• Microsoft Teams
• Mitel
• NetSapiens
• NEC Univerge Blue
• uaCSTA
• Unify

Call recording

If your customers are making and receiving calls all day long, there’s a high chance they need some or all of them recorded.

Use cases for call recording include:

• Call center training
• Call center monitoring
• Legal and compliance
• Dispute resolution
• Documentation of agreements
• Fraud detection and prevention

Ultimately, there’s no convincing a customer they need call recording. They’ll know if they do or don’t need it. The simple prospect of having it in your arsenal means you can say yes as the first check box exercise then expand on your offering.

As well as the basic capability to record calls, you open up conversations about storage, sentiment analysis, and regulatory requirements. The more you can help with genuine challenges, the further into a deal you’ll go.

Read More: Akixi Strengthens Microsoft Teams Offering with Oak Innovation’s Certified Call Recording

Analytics and Reporting

They say what gets measured gets managed. That’s precisely the mindset of the customers who are after advanced reporting.

It’s no longer enough to provide basic CDR reporting. Even turning that data into charts is junior school stuff compared to what’s available on the market today.

Customers demand insights that will change how their business performs. This means taking call data and turning it into patterns, conducting trend analysis, and receiving suggestions on where to make changes in their call flows and staffing levels. If there’s performance to be gained, customers want to know about it.

It’s not just traditional voice platforms we’re talking about here, either.

With the market domination of Microsoft Teams, there’s an untapped part of the market available for service providers. The lack of Teams call reporting options means the opportunity to add value to Teams customers is higher than potentially any point in history.

Imagine being able to say you can deliver stats on:

• Call path
• Resources used
• Periods of high call abandonment
• What call outcomes means for your bottom line

Delivering an extra $1 to $8 per seat per month, voice analytics stands out as the most obvious option to add to your Teams portfolio.

Informal contact centers

You might not be a provider of omnichannel contact centers. But you might not need to be to win deals.

The notion of an informal contact center is one that’s gone without a name for decades. When customers don’t want to invest in ~$100 per user per month licences to enable web chat, email, and social media customer support, there’s always been another option.

Only, it’s taken professional services, bit-part solutions, and a ton of configuration to get a smooth call flow with the right options, reporting, and recording.

And then there’s the part nobody likes to speak about: the cost of creating such a solution. End customers often would be better off implementing the ~$100 per user per month solution by the time the one-off charges and internal resource time have been eaten up.

Instead of this arduous and time-consuming project, Akixi packages an informal contact center:

• Basic call routing to ensure calls are directed to the right agent or team
• Reporting and analytics tools to provide visibility of call traffic and user activity
• Agent and supervisor client dashboards to provide visibility into statistics and activity
• Workforce management insights for scheduling, staffing, etc.

Customers get what they need to best serve their clients. You get an extra revenue stream.

The opportunity for service providers is greater than you think.

If you’re a provider of voice/UC licenses, you might have got bogged down in pricing wars or lost out on deals because you don’t provide shiny new AI technology.

There’s still a huge market left to penetrate.

Services like call recording, analytics, and CRM integration are must-haves for tons of businesses. When packaged correctly, you’re enabling your business to win more deals, provide sticky services that contribute to retention, and add extra revenue streams.