It has been a week full of UCaaS. I did a workshop on building a UCaaS practice for MSPs. I also sat on a monthly call about UCaaS sales.
The call centered around Avaya, 8×8 and RingCentral. Vonage did not get props, but Evolve IP did. Mid-market and above is the UCaaS target.
All the UC players are targeting mid-market. Bigger ARPU, larger contract value. Enterprise is still on Avaya and moving to either Cisco or Microsoft. Period. If Five9’s or InContact do a deal with MS for CCaaS on top of Skype4B, game over.
I venture to guess that the study was right and that small business (up to 25 seats) still wants POTS. SIP Trunking over a cable modem is an awful experience. CPaaS is a step above SIP trunks and SD-WAN can help out that call quality (in the short run). If not, that is what the cell phone is for, right?
At the MSP event, not many of them want to deal with voice. Too many moving parts. Not enough control. Providers are not stable/stellar. The money isn’t worth it. Let me repeat that: the commission isn’t worth the time and effort. That is Apathy. Not certain the industry can get over that.
There are only 18,500 firms with 500+ employees. That is where all the focus is now. On that 18,500. And the margins to win those deals keeps shrinking. As time goes on, winning these deals will mean lower seat pricing and less margin. No idea how that works out.
I see companies buying Ring and others for cheap voice. Just consulted on a 2800 location deployment. All for flat rate voice, click to call, call logs and voicemail. If there was a way to roll up cable bills into one entity easily, it would have been cable voice instead. To me, this is basically a CPaaS deal – except CPaaS bills on usage.
If all the focus is at 500+ employees. What happens to the 2 million businesses with between 10 and 100 employees. To win that business, the sale has to be frictionless. And the service delivery HAS got to improve.
“A report by IHS Markit found that 75% of the service provider respondents said that enhancing customer experience was their top digital transformation project, followed by automation (44%) and cloudification (38%),” from Fierce.
There is Apathy from the partners to sell UCaaS. There is Apathy from the customers on the features.
There is an education issue – both pre-sale and post-sale. Before the sale, the users can’t tell the difference; can’t easily suss out the benefits or outcomes. Post sale, there isn’t enough user training to increase adoption and thus stickiness and customer satisfaction.
Not saying I have an answer. I think the providers are going to have to take a long look in the mirror and decide if they want to be a tech company, a service business or technology business partner to the customer. Then create a culture around that choice. Own it and point the whole of the company’s efforts in that direction.
Years ago 8×8 was a technology company. A new CEO forced them to pivot to a sales company (service provider). That focus worked for a while. ‘
RingCentral knows it is just a marketing company. They were winning the UX game but I hear that others have caught up or gone past.
Who knows where it will go next but the winner will be the most focused. Not the loudest but the most focused.
Culture can win here. Culture can beat Apathy.