Technology Reseller talks to NFON UK about the opportunities for IT resellers in voice and CX. Technical Director Hemal Gajjar highlights NFON’s technical strength, from ownership of its own platform to an ambitious R&D programme, while UK Marketing Director Chris SelbyRickards outlines the extensive support given to channel partners – especially those new to voice. Together, they talk about today’s growth areas, including Microsoft Teams integrations, cloud contact centres and AI, and explain why now is the ideal time for IT resellers to bring NFON business communications into their portfolios. It’s not just about the ISDN switch-off. Technology Reseller (TR): NFON was founded in Munich, Germany in 2007 and, in 2013, expanded into the UK and Ireland where it now has a network of about 200 active partners selling predominantly, but not exclusively, to SMEs. What would you say are its main differentiators? Hemal Gajjar (HG): I would say the best thing about NFON is that we own our own platform. It's designed by us and the R&D on the platform is our own so we are able to be really agile. We can develop new features very rapidly and have control over our end user offering. Chris Selby-Rickards (CS-R): We floated on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange a few years ago and raised an awful lot of capital to enable us to pump money back into R&D and keep developing our platform. We are completely channel-based. We only work with resellers and don't sell to end users. We work hand in hand with our partners and they feed their customers’ needs back to us, so our R&D schedule is very much based on what customers want. Teams players Why technology resellers should make the most of opportunities in voice – and how cloud communications provider NFON can help TR: What do you see as the key growth areas at the moment? CS-R: The market went from just telephony to unified communications and now the trend is towards what we would call collaboration-enabled licences. It's more than just dial tone and voice. People are wanting to utilise tools like Microsoft Teams, but in a single interface, in a single offering. We've spent a lot of time and money developing our Microsoft Teams integrations and continue to push that. Now, with things like the ISDN switch-off and the move from on-prem systems to the cloud, we're seeing more and more companies across the spectrum going straight to collaboration-only. They want different integrations, mostly but not exclusively with Microsoft Teams. That has shaped our development, so we now have four routes to market (Ed – the Cloudya cloud phone system; SIP Trunk Flex, bringing the benefits of the cloud to an existing phone system; integrations between Cloudya and existing IT and collaboration systems e.g. Microsoft Teams, CRM, ERP etc.; and a cloud contact centre). HG: That's one of the reasons why we're targeting IT resellers. As Chris said, there’s going to be a big push to Teams with the ISDN switchoff and we know IT resellers are comfortable with Microsoft. We have a SIP trunk offering and we have Direct Routing, which is very much enterprise-grade because it integrates Teams with our Cloudya platform. Operator Connect will eventually become the dominant option, but for now it's Direct Routing. CS-R: IT resellers need to expand their portfolios and voice is an obvious addition. Many of their customers want to consolidate all their services into one offering, so they will no longer have one person to do their telephony, one person to do their photocopiers, one person to do their connectivity. Instead, they will have one supplier, one invoice and one price. IT resellers have an advantage because they have skills and expertise in Microsoft and that infrastructure. Adding voice can be challenging, but that's where we come in. TR: Obviously, having control of your own platform makes these integrations easier. HG: One hundred percent. We work well with our partners, we're always getting feedback from them, and there is a very smooth process back to development. We produce whatever features are needed and can easily integrate with Teams or anything new that comes to market. TR: Cloud contact centres is one of the four routes to market that you mentioned. Is that a growing area for you? CS-R: We launched Contact Centre Hub, our Cloud Contact Centre offering, at the beginning of last year and it’s been a massive growth area for us. We forecast that demand would be in a specific size of business, but we've seen growth across all sizes of business, particularly the mid-market. Customer experience is the number one trend now, when you can't compete with price and product alone. And one of the biggest ways to achieve CX is to have the right omni-channel solution in place so that your customers can do things their way. COMMS These are edited highlights of a video interview between James Goulding, Editor of Technology Reseller, and NFON UK. Just click the video link to see the interview in full. MSP -bulletin e TECHNOLOGY RESELLER MAGAZINE I N PRI NT & ONLI NE IN PRINT & ONLINE SINCE 2016 SINCE 2016
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