Why partnerships matter

Partnerships are critical in all walks of life, but never more so than in the commercial environment where a key partnership can help businesses offer new products to an existing customer base, leveraging greater profits, with minimal investment, whilst improving brand equity and customer loyalty. A win for everybody. But choosing the right partner is critical. Synergies in thinking and service are hugely important and recognising the potential exposure of a brand means choosing the right partner is about more than just making more profit.

Here at Firstcom Europe, our channel business is a key area of our UK Go To Market Strategy with a proven on-boarding and scalable model which is underpinned by our commercial flexibility and bureau billing offering. More importantly though, we have a dedicated team committed to ensuring we complement our partners to increase opportunity for them and their customers. Our products must fit seamlessly alongside our partner’s and deliver new profit, not just cannibalise existing revenue.

Our core offering

The core services delivered via our channel of over 200 partners is our Universe UCaaS offering, This unified communications service offers unbelievable flexibility for customers, a user friendly interface, robust connectivity and an advanced set of features: Call recording, call transfer, call centre functionality, SIP internet connectivity, IVR call handling, call queuing and much more.

Universe is a cloud-based service. This means that you have no equipment to look after. All upgrades are free  and automatic. You can locate your staff where they need to be, in remote offices, at home or on the move.

A profitable partnership

Recently a large customer wanted to partner with Firstcom Europe, targeting a base of non-telco clients with an appropriate product that would make sense to their customers, fit alongside existing offerings and represent an easy sell for their existing sales functions. Our client had an appetite to maximise the opportunity of cross-sell of other services to customers. However with no knowledge or skills of industries and markets outside of their core business and an inability to bill recurring services, they needed our expertise to realise their ambitions. We were happy to help!

The solution

In the words of our client. “Through partnering with Firstcom Europe we were able to offer new and innovative products to our customer base from additional, non-competitive, budgets and vastly improve retention with additional products and services that generate long term recurring revenue. At the same time we were able to sell Firstcom’s Universe product safe in the knowledge it was a proven product in a competitive landscape . The success we have seen in terms of take up on offering Universe to our customer base has been excellent and the team has been motivated to evolve the conversation beyond our core services”

Existing call centre team was able to sell in Universe alongside other complementary products

The result

Again we find ourselves simply echoing the words of a very satisfied client. “The results of this partnership have been fantastic both from a cross sell perspective and in acquiring new business, which in turn will allow us to sell our core services into as and when the time is right. We have seen an increase of 15% in quotes being provide, 11% increase to revenue won and 16% increase to monthly margin being won. All in all, we are delighted to the partnership, and we look forward to seeing how we take this to the next level with additional products and services from Firstcom Europe.”