Customer Management

The new telecoms landscape: why SME customers are demanding more

Simplified business regulation, access to capital and technology mean that the once prohibitive costs of setting up a business and challenging a market continue to be eroded.

Global businesses are being disrupted by sole traders and market share can shift overnight.

Despite the lower cost of entry, the arrival of cloud based pay-as-you-use technologies and the ability to disrupt, building and running a small business remains tough. In a highly competitive market, the need to be agile is as strong as ever.

It is against this backdrop that telecoms service providers selling to small businesses need to adapt their offering. While the environment may change, certain drivers remain true for the small business decision maker; the shortage of time, the need for efficiency and the ability to focus on their business rather than on multiple suppliers.

In response to this, the telecoms industry and its reseller network has long since embraced the concepts of ‘triple’ and ‘quad-play’ services, bundling telephony services with other essentials like broadband connectivity, data sharing and mobile. With flexible contracts and commoditised services leading to price cuts and customer churn, the more essential services that a telecoms provider can supply to its portfolio of small business customers, the more secure it will be.

The buyer’s mindset

With a long list of responsibilities, directors at smaller businesses often find it difficult to manage commitments to multiple suppliers. Recent research into this issue revealed that over 50% of businesses believe they would perform better if they didn’t have to manage external suppliers, while over a third don’t know how many suppliers they actually use.

This audience requires much more than the traditional telecoms services to start doing business. Today's SME needs an online presence, meaning that services such as storage, hosting, security and even website design are all basic requirements from day one. As the research above indicates, a majority of small business decision makers resent going to multiple suppliers for each of these needs, giving rise to their growing demand for a ‘one-stop shop’ offering from service providers.

Responding to demand

One leading telco responding to this demand is Filipino operator Globe Telecom, one of the APAC region’s largest telecoms vendors. Recognising the opportunity to add more to its existing multi-play offering, Globe recently incorporated website-building services into its portfolio, responding to the surge in demand from Philippine-based SMEs for a ‘one-stop shop’ offering as their communication needs become digital.

This move has allowed Globe to broaden its appeal not only to SMEs directly, but also to its existing partner network, which has the opportunity to bundle other non-traditional telecom services as part of its offering. It’s not unrealistic to expect to see service providers starting to offer products such as web hosting, storage and software-as-a-service to its SME audience based on this precedent.

Making it ‘sticky’

The real advantage this offers is that it helps boost buyer retention and longevity, creating a sense of ‘stickiness’ as the buyer is more inclined to trust service providers that can offer a more well-rounded proposition. With a wealth of information readily available, today’s business buyer is likely to be aware of the options available to them having spent more time researching the purchase themselves, rather than waiting to be sold to.

Whereas telecom service providers may have previously been expected to make a ‘quick-fix’ sale, the expectation now is for them to create a long-lasting appeal by adding services that keep the buyer returning on a more frequent basis. This helps foster a relationship between the service provider and the buyer, ensuring that the latter sees the former as a valuable partner in helping it get up and running. As Globe’s example demonstrates, by incorporating non-traditional telecoms services into their product portfolios, vendors and service providers can improve their customer retention rates.

The new multiplay

In this new landscape, the small business buyer has a greater level of control than ever before. With access to all of the information they need, yet a growing level of frustration with managing multiple suppliers, this audience isn’t going to return to vendors and service providers that don’t meet their needs.

All of this points to a clear opportunity for both vendors and the partners they rely on to redefine their core offering and respond to the changing nature of SME buyer demand. In addition to website building, SMEs require a range of non-traditional telecoms services to get up and running. Telecoms service providers can’t afford to overlook this valuable market segment any longer.

Andrew Garney is the Global Partnerships Manager at BaseKit.



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