In efforts to acquire market share and retain control of expenditure these organisations are looking to their communications partners for resilient, feature rich solutions that are available without capital investment and that can now be deployed end to end in incredibly short measure.
Following the multi-tiered Network and communications development of the last few years, the once embryonic ‘Cloud based’ environment is becoming increasingly developmental and Businesses are gaining confidence in and embracing access to network ‘soft’ services that are suddenly accessible, affordable and easily implemented. Increasingly the companies asking for these business enhancing services are appearing in the mid-market sector and the rapid take-up of IP based PBX telephony amongst SMEs has seen an increasing demand for related services that make real differences to day to day effectiveness and productivity.
Immediate On Demand SAAS delivery offers both service providers and end users application choice but, critically, applications matched to ever transient business need. The demonstrable value and resultant productivity rather than just ‘functionality’ will allow end users real profitability increase and providers an ability to ‘punch above weight’ whilst removing traditional competition. Partners can offer their customers Hosted services that were once thought of as technologically complex and difficult to implement. They can present commercially compelling models that see the customer Capex stay firmly in the pocket as Opex will facilitate the swift On-Demand addition of services critical to their business need. Hosted On demand Call recording is a typical service that is exploding into the SME environment.
More and more, Partner supplied hosted applications, which enable end users to avoid expensive capital commitments, but which can provide feature rich functionality within the framework of a reliable network setting are attractive propositions for recruiting and maintaining customers. Call Recording is particularly attractive since the more calls that are recorded and stored, the more savings customers make on their own IT costs and the more they rely on the expertise of their service provider to host and store their call recordings in a secure and reliable fashion.
Increasingly whilst customer acquisition is still an important issue, it is customer stickiness, loyalty and retention that are the key issues for operators looking to leverage profitable and long term relationships with their clients. Partners who typically work variable and increasingly challenged margins on telephony provision can become service providers with applications such as call recording offering value added service that genuinely impacts productivity and profitability making the partnership less likely to ‘churn’ for another ‘cheaper’ price per minute offering.
Another high impact reason for smaller businesses to now need call recording services is regulation. The FSA and PCI compliance requirements are now affecting all forms of businesses with Call recording being central to the way in which these requirements can be achieved. Partners can remove the concern over how to understand and implement change relating to regulatory requirement by gaining access to services such seamless functionality quickly and easily into the end user environment.
Many businesses are now becoming aware of the need to record mobile conversations and to be able to easily access, monitor, evaluate and manage the content of those calls to ensure the required quality management and on-going training necessary to remain compliant and increase effectiveness and productivity.