Reseller Opportunities: Hosted PBX For Multi-Location Companies
Most multi-location companies rely on private branch telephone networks for inter-office business communication. More commonly known as a private branch exchange (PBX), analog systems rely on a complex network of telephone wires and jacks to facilitate call transfers between departments. Incoming and outgoing calls are transmitted over a public switched telephone network (PSTN). Although this type of system managed to keep business communication strong for decades, analog PBX systems offer a limited number of outdated features. They’re also costly to maintain.
To help keep pace with the competition, many business owners and IT decision-makers are investing in cloud-sourced communication solutions. The demand for hosted PBX is so strong that market analysts anticipate a CAGR of more than 15% through 2028. That projection suggests there’s no better time to become a white-label reseller. Once you understand the benefits of hosted PBX for multi-location companies, it’s much easier to see how reselling cost-effective white-label communication solutions could also benefit your brand.
What Is Hosted PBX?
By definition, hosted public branch exchange (hosted PBX) is a telephone system developed, delivered, managed, and maintained by a third-party service provider and designed for business use. It’s an alternative that allows business owners and IT decision-makers to take advantage of a wide range of advanced features without investing in expensive equipment. Calls are routed through a PBX service provider before reaching their business phone. For multi-location businesses, hosted PBX offers significant advantages.
What Are the Advantages of Becoming a White Label Reseller?
White-label products and services are made by one company, then made available to multiple vendors for branding and reselling for profit. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. As a reseller of third-party hosted PBX, you gain all the advantages of offering in-demand services without investing the time or expense of building a platform from the ground up or maintaining the infrastructure. You also own the customer relationship. Your platform provider benefits from the ability to reach more customers.
Related: Does It Pay To Become a Telecom Reseller?
With the right reseller partnership, you’ll have everything you need to brand secure, reliable, and reputable hosted PBX as your own. In addition to managing and maintaining the technical side of the services you incorporate into your brand, the best service providers simplify the business end of their arrangements with automated invoicing, QuickBooks integration, and a taxation engine. It’s a business model that gives you the support you need to provide exceptional customer service while leaving plenty of time for lead management, customer engagement, and further expanding your brand.
How Do Multi-Location Reseller Clients Benefit from Hosted PBX?
With analog BPX, multi-location companies need a separate system for connecting phones and fax machines to a public switched telephone network (PSTN) over plain old telephone service (POTS) lines for each location. The switching mechanisms linking internal phones and extensions allow for shared access to a limited number of external phone lines. The business owner is responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting, repairs, and system upgrades to analog PBX systems.
Whether their locations are spread across many states or several countries, most multi-location companies end up with invoices from telephone companies in each service area. For most, that means absorbing the cost of phone lines that are seldom used in addition to the fees they have to pay for long-distance or international calls over multiple invoices, and those expenses add up.
As you ponder some of the many ways reselling hosted PBX could benefit your brand, consider how easy it could be to communicate the following benefits of hosted PBX to multi-location clients:
A Considerable Reduction in Communication Costs
With an analog PBX system, the employees of your multi-location clients can’t make or receive business calls when they’re away from the office. With today’s increasingly mobile workforce, that alone can be problematic enough. But that’s not their only limitation.
Local phone companies typically charge business locations for each installed primary rate interface (PRI) circuit. Each analog PRI circuit supports 23 calls and one data channel simultaneously. Business owners are often forced to pay the increasingly high cost of installing additional PRI circuits and activating individual phone lines to add more employees to their network.
Hosted PBX “phone lines” are virtual and don’t require installation. That allows your multi-location clients to increase the number of people accessing their network as their business needs grow without paying for PRI installation. Incoming and outbound calls are converted to digital packets and transmitted over high-speed broadband.
Your hosted PBX clients only pay for the services they need. That distinct advantage of cloud-sourced communication can translate to a considerable reduction in communication costs for multi-location companies. As a reseller, you’ll be on hand to help your clients customize the features included in their service as their business needs evolve.
Minimizing or Eliminating the Need to Employ In-House Technicians
Maintaining a complex analog PBX system is no simple task. Since the technology is stored and maintained on-premises, many companies relying on “physical” phone lines employ teams of skilled IT technicians for each location. As business owners across numerous industries add group chat, virtual meeting rooms, remote access to shared files, and other digital solutions to ensure remote and hybrid workers have the tools they need for connectivity and productivity, many find their IT departments understaffed and overwhelmed by the additional burden.
Even for companies with dedicated IT teams on staff, outdated technology, loose connections, and aging wires can cause poor call quality or disrupted service, which can severely impact corporate reputation and consumer satisfaction.
With hosted PBX, the technical aspect of voice communication is managed and maintained by a provider specializing in cloud-sourced communication services. There’s no need to keep technicians on hand for telephone services. Around-the-clock monitoring minimizes the risk of tech-related downtime. Calls can be redirected to an alternate location if internet service is interrupted.
Customizable Services & Advanced Call Features
Many multi-location business owners and IT decision-makers still feel they “need” on-premises PBX systems to ensure reliable phone service because they don’t realize how far cloud-hosted technology has advanced over the years. As a result, their workers receive calls with a PBX system capable of performing a limited number of functions. Their representatives can often place incoming calls on hold, mute calls, or transfer calls between departments or individual extensions, but that’s about it.
The features of hosted PBX are already helping numerous multi-location companies meet and exceed caller expectations. Companies enlisting the services of a reputable provider have access to an impressive number of features designed to ensure effective, efficient communication.
With their calls routed through a virtual PBX system, business owners can select the features best suited to their organization, including auto attendants, personalized greetings, voice mail, text-to-speech, call recording, and the many potential benefits of virtual call center support. They can authorize access to specific services from a user-friendly portal from nearly any digital device.
Access to Real-Time and Historic Call Data Analytics
Analog phone bills typically show the time and date calls are made, the phone numbers involved, and call duration. Multi-location businesses operating with an analog PBX system usually cannot utilize this historical data to their advantage. That can translate into a considerable loss of information their managers could use to enhance overall business productivity.
Hosted PBX is a viable solution because of the wealth of digital data that can be stored on the cloud. Many multi-location hosted PBX subscribers appreciate their ability to take full advantage of historical and real-time call analytics.
From the convenience of their dashboards, hosted PBX clients have a single point of entry to track and monitor each location. They also have instant access to the data they need to assess call volume, duration, hold times, and the number of calls abandoned for each location.
Related: The Value of White-Label IT Support Services
Administrators, managers, and team leaders also know at a glance how many active users are currently logged into the system, which associates are making or receiving calls, and the number of calls waiting in the queue. It’s the information that forward-thinking management can respond to proactively to ensure efficient communication and exceptional customer service.
Choosing the Best Hosted PBX Reseller Service Provider for Your Business
Reselling hosted PBX provides an easy way to generate a consistent revenue stream. But whether you’re adding this in-demand business communication solution to a list of products or services your company has been offering for decades or building your brand based on a reseller arrangement, it’s essential to understand that not all reseller opportunities give you access to the type of services you’ll need to ensure long-term consumer satisfaction. To be in the best position to offer your multi-location clients the business communication services best suited for their current and future business needs, consider partnering with a UCaaS platform provider.
As a unified communication as a service (UCaaS) reseller, your single and multi-location companies can manage everything they need for cost-effective business communication, including business SMS, conference calls, remote file sharing, click-to-call features, and AI-enhanced chatbots, from a single, user-friendly interface. Their remote and hybrid workers can access those in-demand services from a PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
The best brandable UCaaS reseller arrangements make building a consistent revenue stream easy by keeping their startup costs minimal and allowing you to offer customized bundles and set your prices. With the right platform provider, you’ll also have the advantages of automated billing, reseller training, and the 24/7 support you need to ensure long-term success.
If you’re still not convinced that taking on the role of a PBX or UCaaS reseller is the best move for your brand, consider the following summaries from relevant case studies:
Successful Reseller Transition from VoIP to UCaaS
After recognizing unified communication as a “logical” step for his business, the founder of an IT service company broke ties with the VoIP platform provider his company had relied on for years because of unreliable service. Ultimately, there was too much downtime. Instead, he chose a UCaaS provider offering geo-redundancy and resilient cloud-native architecture. In a year, that UCaaS reseller added more than 900 seats to his IT business while achieving superior margins.
Replacing Problematic Legacy Services with Unified Communication
A leading IT support service company was working towards raising its business profile and further expanding its market. But after working with a legacy communication service provider for decades, their network was frequently down – hence their search for an alternative to a white-label UCaaS service provider. Switching to a reseller arrangement with a UCaaS platform gave the company top-tier reliability. With less time invested in resolving connectivity issues, the company was in a much better position to focus on business growth.
Providing Reliability After Partnering with a Reliable UCaaS Platform
A company providing telephony and computer infrastructures to area businesses became a VoIP reseller. Over time, minor issues with his VoIP service provider evolved into frequent, hours-long service outages. To avoid losing clients to inconsistent service, the owner partnered with a UCaaS platform provider offering geo-redundant service and system reliability. That owner feels his clients now have access to newer, better features.
Get Ready to Discover How Reselling Hosted PBX Could Benefit Your Business
If you’re intrigued by the possibility of partnering with a communications platform provider that makes it easy to sell hosted PBX under your brand for a healthy profit, visit SkySwitch. As a SkySwitch reseller, you will surely appreciate our UCaaS platform training, branded tier-one support, and our team of dedicated onboarding specialists.
To get started as a SkySwitch reseller, submit a contact form. At SkySwitch, we bring more than technology to the table. Our reseller startup costs are minimal, we offer 24/7 support, and you can learn and deploy our services as your own in as little as 30 days.