1 – More of the same

There will be a ton of “more of the same” in your business. You might already be winning the cloud voice battle for existing customers who simply purchase more seats when they expand.
But can you risk existing business being your only genuine sales strategy? What happens when they stop expanding?

If you can turn “more of the same” into “land and expand”, you’ve got yourself a two-for-one deal and a clear route to margin and profitability.

You can only do this, however, with the right toolset in your portfolio. Peripheral services like call recording, call analytics, and CRM integration all have a huge part to play if you’re serious about succeeding as a service provider in 2025.

Related Article: How To Win More Deals With CRM Integration

2 – The final (?) cloud migrations

In FY25, the market that we serve is still growing. In fact, according to Cavell data, out of a total global available market of 467m users, 392m (82%) have not moved to a cloud communications solution yet.

Dom Black, Growth Director and Principal Analyst at Cavell, advises the next five years will see a rapid increase in cloud uptake.

“Our forecasts show that penetration rates will rapidly increase over the next five years as more businesses move their communications to the cloud.”

It’s clear that lots of businesses remain on legacy fixed-line hardware and/or on-premises technology. The cloud migration play is still an important one. However, the state of play has changed. No longer is it enough to simply offer cloud voice seats.

Like remaining the provider of choice for existing customers, we must provide peripheral services like:

• Call recording
• CRM integration
• Call reporting and analytics

Service providers have such a great opportunity to serve those new to the cloud. Most are still seeking PBX feature parity when it comes to replacing their existing phone system with a cloud equivalent. Even market leaders like Microsoft Teams fail to replicate the expected format and feature set without the help of a third party. 

So, while a key driver of cloud PBX adoption that can’t be understated is Microsoft Teams, with experts predicting Teams will continue to grow, service providers have the chance to replicate total feature parity with value added services complementary to the core Teams Phone offering.

Related Article: The Ultimate Guide to Microsoft Teams Call Reporting

3 – New considerations 

While it’s easy to get carried away with technology like artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality, the service provider market is more concerned with real world issues like security and compliance.

We’ve been talking about PCI compliance, GDPR, and data protection for the longest time. Now, thanks to improvements in workflows, driven by automation, we can ensure customers and admins don’t get bogged down or become at risk of non-compliance when setting up users and making changes.

There’s no more:

• Leaky data
• Tenant-wide errors impacting compliance
• Unauthorized access to devices, portals, etc.
• Overcharging due to the wrong license being assigned

Manual errors are one of the largest contributors to non-compliance. Every time something goes wrong (and undetected), it’s like leaving the door ajar for someone or something to crawl in.

💡💡 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.

Anecdotally, Mike Wilkinson, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Akixi, says,

“It’s not a quantitative assessment when figuring out whether to embrace automation. It’s a binary assessment. Service providers won’t deploy without automation as it’s simply unmanageable.”

Where security and compliance are concerned, the equation is simple:

Service providers + automation =  Less chance of security/compliance breaches.

Related Article: Why Automation for Service Providers is So Critical

It was once the case of quantity over quality for some service providers. Having a variety of cloud voice platforms in your portfolio was enough to feel confident walking into any deal.

Today, however, customers and competitors are more clued up. No matter how many voice platforms are in your basket, if they don’t perform everything your customer needs, there’s another option.

Consider these two vital steps when planning portfolio development…

How will you bring differentiation to the market?

Finding the number of service providers in the US is tricky. That’s because of the pure volume of businesses that sell similar services.

There are around 3,000 internet service providers. There are around 1,000 wireless service providers. Then there’s the 1,088 registered VoIP providers. And that’s just the US ones formally registered to sell these types of services.

The point here is that there are a lot of players in this market. Standing out means doing something different.

It can’t be:

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

But it can be:

• We provide all the services you need
• We extend PBX functionality to do A, B, and C
• We offer value added services that match the needs of your industry

Being able to genuinely meet all your customers’ needs, at a reasonable price and with solid support, remains the best way to stand out among the countless providers of VoIP technology worldwide.

Allowing your customers to do more with less 

When a business makes thousands of calls per year, it generates thousands of bits of data. Without a comprehensive analytics package, this data is merely a waste by-product. It still gets generated but nobody can do anything with it.

The introduction of call reporting and analytics, using call records and data that gets generated regardless, means businesses can make informed decisions about things like staffing levels, customer satisfaction, or self-service.

This even applies in real time. Take a call center, handling hundreds of inbound calls every day. By simply displaying the information generated by the calls you’re handling, supervisors can respond to broken thresholds in acceptable metrics and service levels.

Similar applies to CRM integration. The combining of customers’ two most relied upon systems means customers can do more with less. Or, more specifically, not having updated two systems with the same information. 

Through 2023 and 2024, our industry was rocked by the rapid uptake of AI and the clear use cases for automation. From new introductions like Microsoft Copilot to improvements to existing workflows in the contact center world, there’s a lot of cool technology for customers to get distracted by. 

These will remain the level above the market you’re playing in. 

Customers will still need the core voice licenses, their calls recorded, and a clear dashboard with detailed back end reports. Even with all the automation and AI to hit the CRM space, they still need to be integrated with UC/voice solutions. There is a world where all these services co-exist—and it’s the most likely scenario you’ll find yourself in.

For some customers, and for a lot of service providers this means most customers, introducing AI at this early stage of the technology’s lifecycle isn’t a consideration. There’s rarely any benefit in trying to run before you can walk.

Armed with your VAS, however, you can package exactly what a customer needs without feeling like you’re selling overkill services.

For example, you might create an informal contact center. 

When customers don’t need expensive omnichannel licenses, you can create your own package with the features they do need. By configuring call queues and auto attendants then combining them with the needed value add services, customers get what they want and you’re the vendor holding the keys.