City Telecom addresses B2B enterprise market

  City Telecom’s new site 

Client Company
City Telecom has been established since 1985, and over the years has been expanding its customer base and its product and services portfolio to the point where it has become one of the few one-stop-shops in the industry today to provide mobile, telecom, and internet services the medium to large enterprises either directly, through a reseller channel, or via its online ecommerce website.

The Challenge / Marketing problem
Businesses and resellers usually have more than one telecom or mobile requirement to satisfy their communications requirements. These can include many varying configurations such as SIM cards with different plans for each user, mobile broadband requirements and products, mobile handsets, ADSL solutions, hosted and managed VoIP solutions, ISDN,wireless, some levels of disaster recovery, and the list goes on. The real challenge becomes the minimizing of service provider management.

Resellers choosing a service provider
Resellers generally look to providers that can be flexible enough to provide as many possible solutions variations to meet a range of their customer’s requirements. This would demand that the service provider is able to tailor is services to each individual company or reseller whether it be an order for 1 product or service to 1000 units, plans, products, services, etc.

Resellers would normally need to source products and services from more than one location or supplier, understand what the initial and monthly ongoing cost would be to their customers, and then prepare their quote. This process for resellers would normally take anywhere between three to four hours to one or two days depending upon the complexity of the customers requirements.

The B2B Solution
Provide a website ecommerce quoting and configuration tool that would allow the reseller/partner to order an infinite combination of bundles, services, products, and solutions online by creating their own unique package. Allow resellers or end-users to use the tool for research, quoting, service configuration, buying products and services, and allow it to become white labelled if necessary.

The quoting/configuration tool details:
The ecommerce quote/configuration tool meets several challenges that many companies and resellers have been looking for. The biggest among these is the time reduction to resource products and services for quoting and package or bundle configuration.

This B2B solution cuts the resellers’ time from hours or days to minutes. Additionally, the reseller could also offer their customers with a single bill solution as the tool automatically aggregates all the bills and provides not only the upfront costs but the monthly costs as well.

For example: Broadband access or an ISDN solution has both upfront costs and well as ongoing monthly cost to consider. Mobile and mobile broadband solutions may or may not have any upfront costs, as the phone and access device is included within the tariff plans. Number Porting may or may not have both upfront or monthly costs depending upon how the solutions is sold or packaged.

Another consideration is discount levels for longer contracts. Most online quote systems only let you see the discount near the end of the transaction, not upfront to help the reseller or company take into consideration for budgeting purposes for longer contracts. Most companies simply ask you to contact them directly to obtain a price. The icing on the cake is that this can be done on the fly and the reseller or partner does not need to provide their name, email, or phone number just to get a quote or configuration to determine if the desired solution is within the customers budget or service needs.

The Results
City Telecom has seen an increase in return customers spending 10 to 15 minutes on the website using the configuration tool, and resellers are looking further into white label options for their own company to service their client base.

As the City Telecom ecommerce quote engine expands across many different types of solution sets and technologies, in essence offering resellers an infinite number of service and product combinations in the mobile business space, resellers are not confined to a single package which can be costly to promote and confined to only a few market segments, but they can expand their services to a bespoke level to fit with their customers exact requirements.

The benefit to the customer is that supplier (or reseller) management costs are reduced since the customer has only to look to the reseller if there is a problem. From the suppliers (or resellers) point of view, since each customer has order multiple services, the customers’ value has increased and there will be a natural increase in a customer centric focus due to multiple services being supplied from one provider. The balance for each customer is to order the correct number of services as to not create a reciprocal unhealthy dependency.

Going forward
City Telecom is responding to its new customers and resellers by adding more products and services to the configuration and quoting tool. Eventually, the product will be evolving to a true SaaS solution for the mobile, telecom, and internet market space.  A greater ability to be a true customer-centric organisation providing flexible mobile and telecom business solution offering across verticals has become possible

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