What constitutes value? Is it the price you pay, the service you receive or the supplier relationship? I believe that all three of these factors equate to real value.
It can be a challenge to demonstrate value to a small business who are looking to pay the same price as a consumer line but still receive an enterprise grade service wrap. Although larger businesses are somewhat savvier, full resilience is still undervalued by some. It’s only when you ask customers to consider the scale of loss if their connectivity goes down that they consider the true value of full resiliency. Even a 5-hour fix SLA would feel like a long time to a large business if their EAD circuit experienced a fault.
Unless you’re a network architect, you probably haven’t considered the impact that the network has on your business. Every network is different, and some are superior to others, providing more stability and high-performance at peak times. Often customers don’t ask providers important questions such as, what are the resiliency options? What’s the network utilisation? Are they updating service index data? What’s the peering like? Do you have choice in terms of which exchanges the EADs will go?
The answers to these important questions reveal a lot about the quality of the network and therefore the reliability of the connectivity. If customers took the time to understand the networks that end-users plug into, they would understand the cost to serve and the real value of working with that provider.
TalkTalk Business is proud of our network. Over the last 12 months we’ve invested over £40 million to transform the network topology that runs across our 3000+ UK points of presence. We’ve upgraded the technology to simplify 80 topologies into two, which has improved service resilience for Partners and reduced costs, allowing us to provide our Partners with increasingly better value services.