Caring about bespoke solution delivery is a subset of caring for customers post-sales and should be a primary goal for all comms providers, according to Karl Alderton, Managing Director, Comms Supply.
Alderton's calling to help SMEs fully understand their options when making buying decisions about their business communications came during a stint working at BT. He joined the company at the age of 18 and developed a successful sales career over a six year period in which he witnessed the issues faced by SMEs when dealing with providers, including some 'horror stories' that spurred him to set up on his own and establish Comms Consulting.
"We would act as the SME's telecoms director, helping them to make informed decisions about the most appropriate telecoms solutions for their business," Alderton explained. "However, I struggled to find suppliers who shared my attitude to customer care and grew increasingly frustrated. The only way to ensure the solutions I recommended would come to fruition in a cost-effective, professional and timely manner was to deliver them myself."
Alderton launched Comms Supply in February 2012 to deliver such solutions. By June 2013 the company had achieved £1 million turnover. "The business has been growing steadily over the past four years but it was three years ago that we started to see the market change dramatically," he said. "One of our first big step changes was to become an ISP in our own right, rather than being a reseller. By taking control of data we knew we'd have a significant advantage as more and more businesses migrated to SIP trunks and hosted solutions."
Comms Supply's natural next step was to develop its own SIP trunk and hosted solutions. "The ability to provide connectivity and the voice product gave us the opportunity to offer bespoke solutions based on the needs of our customers, as opposed to what we could purchase from another provider," stated Alderton.
Despite these successes the most significant milestone in Comms Supply's timeline to date came in January 2015 when the company moved from selling to end users directly and became a channel supplier. "We originally had a soft launch working with a small number of channel partners to ensure our processes were fit for purpose in a channel model," explained Alderton. "In September last year we publicly launched all of our products to the channel, including our hosted solution, YourUCP, and our SIP solution. Since then we have recruited a number of partners who are now enthusiastically recommending our products to their customers."
Over the past two years Comms Supply has witnessed its turnover increase by more than 100 per cent and its workforce double. "We are currently recruiting for three new team members to support our growth and we anticipate needing a further three people by April 2016," commented Alderton. "We believe we will achieve turnover of more than £2 million by the end of this financial year and forecast this to increase by a further 100 per cent over the following two years."
Alderton believes that Comms Supply's channel offering is its biggest opportunity. "Our strategy is to have a reasonably small number of key active partners across the UK, under 500," he added. "Another fundamental element of our approach is that our partners always have access to an engineer. After carrying out some customer research we decided that the customer experience was far more efficient and satisfactory when every query was handled by an experienced engineer, rather than a customer service executive."
Poor communication is a big stumbling block when building effective business relationships, noted Alderton. "That's why our partners receive a regular stream of updates about their order or service issue," he said. "They have the information they need to update their customers without needing to constantly chase us which improves the customer service they can deliver and reduces administration time for both parties."
Alderton is also aware that Comms Supply needs to increase the capacity of its voice network, and plans to do just that by over 1,000 per cent next month. "Some UK providers have run out of capacity in the past 24 months and we are determined to prevent this happening to us," he added. "As with any major upgrade, we need to fund the project without increasing the cost to our partners."
Alderton's other primary goal this year is to finalise Comms Supply's partner portal which will offer a single hub for partner interactions. "We want this portal to be intuitive and helpful for all of our partners, so we're investing heavily to get this spot on. Our hope is that we can get to 90 per cent of all interaction available from a single interface by the end of 2016."
A trend noted by Alderton is the growing demand for bundled services, whether that's free SIP trunks as part of a data solution or free minutes with a hosted solution. "We have already started providing bundled services," he said. "For example, all Ethernet Internet connections including EoFTTC and EFM are provided with free SIP trunks, which has supported a large increase in EoFTTC connections across our partner base. We are now discussing with our partners what other bundled solutions would allow them to sell more services while ensuring they are still able to retain a good margin."•