The Best Tool Telecom Resellers Have For The Future

Here’s a highlight from our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar where we ask our best resellers what problems their customers faced from the pandemic, how they solved it, and what we can learn from it to be even more prepared for the future.

Video Transcript:

Andy:

What was the one thing you learned that if you knew then what you know now, you would be doing differently?

Louis:

I definitely agree with Dan. We ran into that same thing. But one of the things we learned is our clients were much more open to having multiple devices full time.

One of the nice things with SkySwitch, we can have five devices per extension without additional seat charges. 

And once I started engaging customers who are now going to be living in this new reality, almost a hundred percent of them said, “so we just have to, you know, just for the one-time cost of the phone, we could leave the phone at home?” 

We had clients taking phones back and forth. They weren’t working full-time at home. They might’ve been working at home two, three days a week and they just got tired of dragging their phone around. 

Once we made all of our customers aware of that, they really appreciated that. So now we’re starting to sell a bunch more phones the last few weeks; just getting customers set up. So now they can have devices wherever they need to work full time. So I think that made us look really good when we were able to tell them we could do that very easily.

Andy:

So what you, what you’re saying is a lot of your customers created a new brand of mobile phone with Yealink or Polly or Grandstream, or any other brands that they have on their desk that became a mobile phone because they were having to take it to and from when really there was an easier solution. 

During the period of time where they were waiting to get second phones or third phones to work from at home, did you find any of them picking up the use of ReachUC, the soft client, and coming to you for help with configuration? Or what was it like around ReachUC?

Louis:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess it depends on the type of client, not all of our clients were even aware that a mobile app existed; that there are some situations where we sell to certain businesses that it’s, it’s just not necessary. 

So a lot of people didn’t even know about it. So we started getting the support tickets of just, “how do we work from home”? 

And then that’s when we introduced the mobile app to a lot of clients, the existing clients who knew about it, we didn’t hear from them because they just started using the app full time, rather than as an ancillary phone. 

I’m sure everybody else can speak to this, that the challenge with the mobile app is, of course, their internet, at home, as everybody’s experiences during the pandemic have just overworked or not enough bandwidth or not enough GOs at home.

We still struggle with that. We had to put out a blanket email to the office managers, basically, every one of our clients to let everyone know that this is a best-effort product. It’s going to depend on these variables. It’s not going to be the same experience you have with the desk phone. 

Once we kind of set the table with those parameters, things kind of calmed down and people understood, and as I’m sure other people experienced, turning off Wifi was a big hit for us.

That at least the cellular network tended to be a little better than a lot of people’s home broadband just where they were so that the mobile app really saved us.

And in the sense of, I think we may have lost clients, had we not been able to have that and to Skyswitch’s benefit. I know there were some capacity issues when things ramped up, but Skyswitch stepped up. I don’t know what you guys did in terms of the technical backend in terms of spinning up more resources. But that was brilliant. That SkySwitch was able to do that very quickly.

This is just a highlight of our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar. Get even more tips, insight, and guidance with the full webinar right here.