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Bob Crissman
By Bob Crissman, Vonage Senior Vice President and Channel Chief
Enterprises today need business communications systems that do two things: efficiently power internal communications and collaboration for employees and improve engagement with stakeholders outside the company to deepen relationships and increase customer loyalty.
As cloud communications services move upmarket, your clients need a trusted adviser. Gartner’s new UCaaS market guide for midsize enterprises says sales reached $1.5 billion in 2017; the consultancy predicts a 19 percent CAGR, culminating in nearly $3 billion in spend by the end of 2021.
To fulfill this promise, carriers need to deliver exceptional products and supporting infrastructure, on-point service delivery and ongoing training, and marketing and provisioning guidance. Cloud providers must support partners by sponsoring training events, providing personalized sales and training support and access to engineering staff, creating fast quoting tools and following up with reliable installs, and delivering exceptional ongoing care and support for customers.
Your job? The key to happy end customers is assembling an offering that includes a comprehensive feature set with all the tools and services they need to keep staff, third-party contractors, end customers and other stakeholders on the same page.
A “walled garden” where employees are on one system and everyone else who contributes to success is on another doesn’t serve business needs.
UCaaS + CPaaS: A Match Made in the Cloud
If you’re not selling unified communications as a service, UCaaS solutions deliver seamless integration with mission-critical cloud-based applications, such as CRM software and popular business-management applications, enabling people to be productive from any device, anytime, anywhere. Providing the ability to seamlessly integrate a cloud-based communications system with a company’s existing business applications, such as G-Suite, Office 365, Salesforce, Zoho and many others, adds tremendous value to the employee/partner/customer relationship.
As BYOD remains ubiquitous, and the workforce becomes more and more mobile, your customers need an efficient way to give employees mobile access to corporate voice telephony, video calling/conferencing, instant messaging and other tools. Our partners say that a main selling point of UCaaS is that it enables mobile workers to seamlessly access business communications tools from multiple devices.
In addition to integration features, UCaaS solutions give partners, including MSPs, CSPs and consultants, tools to help keep their customers’ businesses running smoothly. From fully hosted PBX technology in the cloud and SD-WAN technology to add reliability and optimize QoS and redundancy across a company’s multiple locations; to a fully hosted contact-center solution; to provisioning and support regardless of geographical distance, time zone or budget limitations, you’ll have the tools to better serve customers.
But the fact is, that’s not enough now.
Customers are looking for …