Ingredients to a winning recipe

The voice telecommunications industry is one of the most competitive in the world. There is, however, a perception that it is the easy avenue to making ridiculous amounts of easy money. This is NOT the case.

The truth is that as technology is migrating to Next Generation IP based services, it has become a lot easier to enter the industry and therefore competition has intensified. If you run your business correctly, Voice Services can be a fantastic source of revenue. Even more importantly, it can enable you to compete more effectively for business and also retain
customers more effectively.

It is a well-known fact that customers want to simplify their communications infrastructure as much as possible - and that counts for suppliers as well. The more services a single vendor can supply, the simpler it is for the customer to manage and easier for them to make a change.

So before moving on to the building blocks, there is one more thing I need to highlight. People tend to go over the top one way or the other: they either spend too much money, build too much redundancy, take too long so finalise a project OR they want to do things too cheaply or too quick. You get the picture.

A lot of what we do in our day to day consulting work, is help customers find a balance: They need to invest sufficiently to make sure they can offer a quality service and spend enough time making sure all the bases are covered i.e. they can implement effectively, they can bill properly, they can support the customer effectively, etc.

So let's look at the basic ingredients required to build a winning voice
offering:

• Sales Offering - you need to build an offering that addresses your customers' requirements, while being competitive with what's out there in the market.

• Infrastructure - you need to invest in infrastructure you can rely on. Voice is a mission-critical service and customers are typically less forgiving with service interruptions than you might be used to on the data side of your product offering. Don’t try and do this on the cheap. Think of it as investing in tyres for your car; if you're doing serious mileage or high-speed travel you'll want to make sure you have spent a little extra on quality tyres.

• Process - you need to map out and implement processes to address the relevant aspects of delivering a service. Remember who you are competing with in the voice industry !!! To stand out, you have to demonstrate that you know what you're doing. Make sure you know exactly what steps to follow when you need to implement a new customer or what you need to do when you need to support an existing solution.

• Billing and Invoicing - this is a critical area. If a customer is not convinced that you are invoicing them correctly, all your other efforts are in vain. We see all too often how this critical area is sadly neglected.

• Support - voice telephony is a business-critical service. Make sure you can effectively support your customer. The customer needs to understand exactly what to do when something goes wrong and they need to understand what their redundancy options are.

Going forward we will delve into these ingredients and unpack each element
in an effort to simplify entry into this potentially lucrative industry.