Unified Communications Dealers: Enhance Revenue Streams with App Sales

"App Stores" and the "App Market" are familiar phrases in today's tech world, gaining popularity with the emergence of the Apple iPod, iPad and Google Android devices.

In a logical, winning business move on the b2b side of things, many Unified Communications dealers are also building a diverse portfolio of applications for their customers.

Many such dealers are complimenting their phone system sales with application sales. Besides being a good foot in the door to large revenue telephony platform sales, application sales can generate a high-margin revenue stream of their own.

For years, telephony dealers have aligned themselves with the large, incumbent call recording vendors in order to bundle call recording and quality monitoring with their phone system solution sales.

The typical "Large-Call-Recording-Company" offering was typically a monstrous suite of features which shut out the small and medium sized enterprise and locked the bigger customers into a lifetime's high cost of ownership as well as a re-buy scenario when it comes to upgrades.

We (Coordinated Systems, Inc.) used this as an entry point to entrench our Virtual Observer call recording and quality monitoring solution as an obvious alternative to the existing call recording offerings made available from the telecom market.

Virtual Observer enables channel partners to not only sell call recording and quality monitoring to the smaller and mid-level enterprises, but also to provide enterprise customers with a more affordable, robust system and lower overall cost of ownership.

We also enable our partners to share in professional services (such as CTI, custom integrations, onsite training, etc.) and annual support agreements. It's a very win-win situation for CSI and our partner ecosystem.

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The Rewarding, Renewing Cycle of Sales-Technical-Sales

We at CSI are coming off another solid quarter of new business.

The success of our sales teams directly fuels the workloads of our project management, support and training teams.

Ironically, it's the performance of those same technical folks which gives our sales teams added confidence and gives us marketing staffers the customer retention stats, success stories, and testimonials which we so proudly speak to.

It is always a pleasure to open my Outlook inbox and find a shining example of the customer service efforts provided by my team:

"I just wanted to send an email out to thank all of you at CSI for the great tools and support you offer. I can’t really say enough about the level of customer service provided to me on every interaction I have with your teams. We use one of your products (Virtual Observer) and anytime I’ve had a question or any issues, I give you guys a call and it feels like you drop what your doing to make sure we are up and running. I was assisted in the past by the training team,who always takes care of business. I have also been working with the project teams who always takes the time to answer every questions I may have. I also love that  they take the time to check out our systems and ensure we are running to full capacity.

At Rewards Network we pride ourselves in our World Class Customer Service experience and it’s great to know there are other companies out there that feel the same way. Thanks again for all the help!!!!"

This email was sent today from the desk of Gil Alvarez, Member/Merchant Services Trainer/QA Supervisor for the Rewards Network.

The Rewards Network runs Virtual Observer on an Avaya S8710 phone system, handling recording and quality assurance tasks for their customer service center.

This is proof of the endless cycle of sales feeding the technical staff, who in turn feed the sales and marketing folks.

Internally, at CSI, we treat each individual in our company as a customer, with tremendous respect and consideration for their individual goals as well as the company's goals. We're also not shy about crossing over to help out if another team member needs help.

It's all about keeping the cycle turning.

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CSI earns Partner Loyalty Recognition honor at 2010 NACR Sales Conference

We just finished up attending the NACR / ConvergeOne Sales Conference 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The show was a rousing success for NACR and for CSI, as we were given a prestigious "Partner Loyalty Recognition" ribbon and prism from Tiffany's for continuous years of services:

"NACR recognized 9 partners at a Loyalty Luncheon hosted by Tom Roles, NACR President and CEO. The event was held February 16, 2010 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. as part of the company’s yearly sales conference event. Partners recognized for participating in the past 7 sales conferences were Amcom Software, Avaya Financial Services (AFS), Computer Instruments, CSI, Extreme Networks, Mutare, NICE, SimpliCTI, and Veramark. Each company was awarded an engraved Tiffany pentastar for their continuous support for these events." - Cathy Burns, Partner Relationship Advocate, NACR.

The show brought together a small army of technology companies working together to present NACR's Avaya sales force with a solid array of best-in-breed offerings.

The annual sales conference also featured an introduction of newly acquired Empire Technologies into the ConvergeOne family.

We've been working with NACR for eight years, providing Avaya customers with bulletproof call recording and workforce optimization at an industry's best cost of ownership.