Relevancy is a defining factor for success in the technology landscape. Growing competition combined with a market downturn has meant organisations need to differentiate themselves to stay afloat. This is not just true of vendors, but also of service integrators, who are increasingly seeing their profits eaten up by the goliaths as they too try to expand their offerings.
In the contact centre space, telcos are encroaching on partners’ territory by expanding their offerings into professional services.
Facing diminishing margins and shifting consumer behaviour, telcos have unsurprisingly started to find new revenue streams from the professional services market. Since they already sell the carriage, it’s a natural progression to build service offerings around it. And this has come at the cost of service integrators.
So, what can systems integrators do in order to prove their value and defend their territory?
As-a-Service
To compete, systems integrators need to find new revenue streams. This means finding ways to remain relevant that deliver genuine value while driving profits. For example, more tech companies are transforming to 'as-a-Service' and recurring revenue business models to meet market demand while improving financial sustainability. If you're not already doing this, you should be.
However, due to the billing complexities and costs of implementing new systems, setting up recurring revenue streams can typically be out of reach for many service integrators. Instead, partner with vendors that provide the payment infrastructure for you. What this means is finding solutions that offer natively integrated Billing-as-a-Service (BaaS).
In addition, systems integrators could significantly increase their margins when switching to a recurring revenue model. For voice services, resellers typically get between 10-15% from telco partners, depending on their spend. Traditional partner programs (i.e MS Licenses, Security products) operate on a margin anywhere from 7% to 20%. Depending on how partners bundle their solutions to the end client, adding recurring revenue through SecureCo could see margins increase to between 30-60%.
Avoid vendor lock-in
Locking customers into one vendor is going to increase the risk you take on and limit your ability to add value. You want to find solutions that allow you to add professional services over the top.
Re-selling a solution that allows choice rather than going all in with one vendor means you can sell your team's unique skills, competencies and relationships in specific tech stacks. This will help create service differentiation that grows share of wallet and protects your existing customer base.
Finding solutions that are vendor-agnostic will also allow you to work with best-in-breed technologies, giving customers what they want and keeping them loyal.
Intelligent Voice Platform
SecureCo’s Intelligent Voice Platform (IVP) helps partners bridge technology chasms to provide one seamless solution to customers. IVP allows partners to white-label an end-to-end voice solution, opening up new revenue streams and creating cost efficiencies by only working directly with one solution provider.
Its low-code functionality also makes deployment fast and easy and our Intelligent RevOps means you can add a recurring revenue model without all the extra leg work.
With no hefty upfront fees, SecureCo makes it easy to transition to an ‘as-a-service’ model, helping you to provide more value and compete against new (and old) entrants to the market.
Learn more about SecureCo’s IVP here.