We live in a subscription based world. In 2019, you can listen to music on demand, watch TV on demand and even order your dishwasher tablets to your door on a quarter by quarter basis. So, when it comes to Unified Comms, have vendors got it right with the per seat pricing?
Treating businesses like humans
Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of relating business marketing and business user experience back to consumer marketing and consumer user experience. Every conversation I have about branding or marketing seems to go back to the notion that there is a human behind every business.
Unify seems to have got this spot on with their marketing – finding your collaboration persona and tailoring a solution to the way you work is much better than technical data sheet that nobody reads.
Procurement is changing
Why is this relevant to per seat pricing? The way we buy everything is changing. As a technology that is leading the way businesses communicate and collaborate, Unified Comms must be reactive and dynamic across the board. If enterprises are buying something in bulk, they generally get a discount. There is relevant to the Unified Comms market, as well as many others. However, the number of unused seats and licenses often goes unaudited.
Tools are available to report on usage and redundancy. Unified Comms providers know this themselves but have been poor to communicate this. Is this because they would rather have more seats rolled out to a customer, bringing in recurring revenue? No. It’s because it’s not sexy. It doesn’t take the customer on a journey. It doesn’t make the blog and it get missed off the datasheet.
The story to be told is a massive one. If you use 14,000 of your 15,000 seats per month, that’s 1,000 seats unused that you are paying out. If vendors actively promoted the analytics available in the back or front end of their Unified Comms solution, small businesses to huge conglomerates could be taking advantage of flexible billing and the ROI case studies would come flying in.
Relating back to the consumer experience, we use Netflix, Amazon Prime or Now TV because it’s cheaper to pay £10 per month for access instead of £5 per film. So why isn’t the Unified Comms industry following suit? How about customers pay £2,500 for access to a Unified Comms platform – or whatever relevant – and top up with usage for calls etc as normal. There is definitely a technical reason behind this – but one that we should have worked a way around by now.
Industry view
I reached out to some key players in the wholesale and reseller market to get their opinions on whether per seat pricing in Unified Comms was dated or still the right way to do business.
NTA
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Justin Blaine, Channel Sales Manager at NTA, told me this: “The customers mindset has shifted from wanting ownership to paying for a PaaS or SaaS solution on an ongoing basis, this gives them the added advantage of not having to maintain and make changes with expensive inhouse resource as they can now rely on their partnership with their ICT provider”
Justin continued, “I think customers just want the service to work, not have to look after it, pay for upgrades and ongoing maintenance and invariably want one number to call when they have a problem”.
Jason Byrne, VP of Product and Marketing at Netsapiens, got his team together and provided me with the following views and data:
