Service providers are increasingly being forced to use vendor cloud-based unified comms platforms for their business, even if it doesn’t make business sense to them and this means they are unable to properly differentiate themselves from the competition.
In an interview with UC Today, Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of 2600Hz, said that service providers make their living by differentiate themselves from everybody else. However, if service providers can’t differentiate themselves, they can’t add value and “at some point, someone's just going to undercut you on price”.
Sullivan said that this is where the service providers are having a huge dilemma right now.
“How do we differentiate ourselves and which platforms out there allow us to differentiate ourselves?” he said. “How you deploy is a big differentiation.”
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Patrick Sullivan[/caption]
He said that the most successful service providers are the ones that are hyper-focused on a particular industry or segment of the market, such as healthcare, the restaurant industry or a specific region.
“A lot of times they need to differentiate themselves. If you have an open API structure like we do on our platform, that gives you the ability to integrate with a CRM or point of sale system.”
Sullivan said that for example, a customer can answer calls, record those calls and put this information into a CRM and automatically send back a text message. Or a food delivery shop can send a text message to a customer when an order is on its way. He continued,
“Where the service provider brings in their bread and butter is that they do this integration for their users. Once you have customised something for your end user, and build out their workflow, that customer is not leaving ever,”
He added that this makes for a “very sticky customer”, because they can’t go to a mainstream vendor and replace this, as they won’t have this capability. “You’re selling a solution; you’re not just selling a product.”
