On-premises environments, Other providers, The Cloud
The watershed moment that proves cloud voice has won?
Toshiba has been in the phone system business forever. Now, they are shutting down that very business. Is this a signal that the cloud has won? For Toshiba, it’s been a long time in coming. They were late to adopt IP and even later to move to the cloud. Other traditionally premise-based phone brands are well into multiple years of cloud offering. It’s easy to extrapolate that people just aren’t buying phone systems that they install in their offices anymore.
What does Toshiba’s news mean for the channel?
With Toshiba’s announcement, we see a major provider exiting this space. The message to the channel is clear: if you haven’t added a cloud voice offering to your portfolio, don’t wait too long.
When you make the move to cloud, my message to you is to choose your partner (provider) carefully. Look beyond pricing and feature set. Look for a provider that provides 5-9’s of uptime and is a “channel first” company giving you the power to own the branding, billing, and the customer relationship. Look for a company that will help you in all aspects as your customers look to be moved off of their Toshiba system onto a cloud-based solution.
Intermedia goes beyond the basic channel program
At Intermedia, we know the challenges our partners face when making the decision to offer new products and services. These barriers can take a great opportunity and turn it into a non-starter. At Intermedia, we have our partners covered at every step of the customer acquisition lifecycle. We call it our Circle of Success:
- Training: Our Intermedia University on-demand training courses teach everything from phone systems 101 to how to configure hunt groups and call queues. Your sales, support, and installers can view different courses to help them learn what they need.
- Marketing: We’ve built fully integrated marketing campaigns that combine email, content and social marketing and give you a turnkey way to initiate campaigns in a few minutes.
- Sales support: Critical in any VoIP deployment is to make sure your customer’s network is ready for high-quality voice. That’s why we built VoIP Scout. It’s our proprietary network testing software that allows us to test bi-directionally for jitter, packet loss, and latency. It’ll be your best friend.
- Ordering: When it’s time to quote and order, simply use our online tools or call someone in our Partner Concierge team. We will hand hold you every step of the way till you feel comfortable doing these on your own.
- Onboarding: When it’s time to get your customer turned up with the new service, we send you pre-programed, plug-and-play phones and assist you will all aspects of onboarding your customer. We make sure the customer’s system is configured correctly the first time.
- Billing & taxing: If you choose to bill your customer, no problem. We calculate the telco taxes for you. You simply collect them and send them to us. That’s right, we do the telco taxes. Taxation questions have kept many MSPs out of the voice business. Because we calculate and remit the telco taxes, we ENABLE MSPs to be in the voice business.
- Technical support: Then, we’ve got you covered 24/7 with the tech support you and your customers demand
- Upsell/Cross-sell opportunities: Now that you’ve created such a good experience for your customer, it’s time to offer them more services!
Join us at the Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas!
We’re going to be at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Vegas from April 10th to the 13th. If you’re at the show, come by booth #1053 to learn more about partnership with Intermedia and our cloud voice solution.
And of course, you can learn about Cloud PBX from Intermedia on our website or by calling our experts at 800-379-7729.
