technologyreseller.co.uk 21 TELEPHONY and enhance their stickiness as they now have a service no one else can offer as part of their telephony platform – and win new business from rivals that don’t have this level of functionality. However, there is a cost involved. NTA charges resellers £15 per person, per month for its Whatex service and on top of that there are usage fees. Meta gives each customer up to 1,000 inbound conversations free of charge (a conversation includes any messages, plus pictures, audio files, documents etc., sent to and from a number within a 24-hour period), but it charges around 6p for every outbound conversation. White worries that by focusing on the headline price, resellers might fail to see the bigger picture. “The issue we have is that we supply a telephony service for £4.75 a month with 5,000 minutes inclusive. Whatex is three times the cost of the other services that we offer, so resellers see it as expensive when what they should be looking at is how much time it can save. I hope that as we start adding more people and have more examples of how they are using WhatsApp to automate things, resellers will start to see the value of Whatex.” Then, he believes, adoption will grow rapidly just as it did with fax machines: “I can see WhatsApp becoming the one platform for messaging, not for talking, but certainly for messaging.” www.nta.co.uk custom integrations to help customers with specific workflows, for example automatically sending renewal reminders by WhatsApp (rather than email) or introducing a dedicated button on a desk phone to initiate WhatsApp messages relating to a common, repeatable process. “One company we are working with has thousands of cars out on rental and regularly has people ringing in because they need to replace a tyre. At the moment, they take down the caller’s details and send them a text message or an email with account details and instructions on what to do. They have asked us to put a ‘Tyre notification’ button on their phone that they can press to automatically send the caller a WhatsApp message containing information on the tyres needed, account details and so on. It’s all about speeding up communications and making things more interactive.” Cost concerns Whatex enables resellers to offer additional services to existing customers – Bundle up NTA to introduce per extension line and call bundles This January, NTA is bowing to pressure from resellers and launching a series of line and call bundles, charged on a per extension basis, as an alternative to its established approach of charging resellers for channels that they can share between multiple customers, leaving them to create their own bundles. Paul White argues that the ease with which channels can be shared and managed, combined with the fact that call volumes in most businesses tend to be very low, enables partners to make good money by optimising contention ratios, without impacting the customer experience. Even so, most still prefer the industry norm of packages sold on a per seat basis. “The model we’ve been selling to resellers is pretty unique, but people don’t particularly want unique and they don’t want to build their own bundles. They want to do what everyone else does, and that is to buy a handset bundled with an amount of minutes and services. They buy that for £6, add £6 for themselves and sell it for £12. “We’ve come up with some new package plans because that’s what people are after. It’s not a new idea, but our packages will offer a lot more for less than many other packages on the market.” White is confident these bundles will attract new resellers, while also making NTA look stronger on paper as they will be provided on three-year or five-year contracts, as opposed to the monthly rolling contract of its current model. These bundles follow several other recent enhancements to the NTA telephony service including: n A text-to-speech service that converts text into natural-sounding audio files for use as messages; n Call recording bundles that expand NTA’s traditional pence per minute pricing for recording and storage with a per seat option that gives, say, one month of call recording for a flat fee of 75p per user and the ability to buy a fixed amount of space for storing recordings; n A TPS service that automatically blocks users from calling numbers on the Telephone Preference Service list; and n MobeX+, a new version of the app for making and receiving voice calls on a smartphone. Additionally, the new and improved MobeX Web enables users to connect with others by phone, video, conference and chat. White adds that there are several more developments in the pipeline that build on the company’s in-house development capabilities, citing a new Teams integration product as an example. “We already have Teams integration using a product with another provider, which is what most people use to connect to Teams. Our cost price recently increased to £2.65 per Teams extension and we charge our resellers £2.75, so there’s not much money in it for us. But resellers still feel £2.75 is too much. With our cost prices increasing, we’re now looking to do the Teams integration ourselves rather than buying it from someone else. This will give us more control over the product itself and we’ll be able to charge whatever we like. We’ve still got to buy the software and some licences but even so we should be able to drop our price from £2.75 per user to around 50p, which will enable us to include it in the price of the service packages we’re creating.”
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