Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is the modern way for your clients to stay connected to you and the people they work with. For partners and customers, UCaaS is a combination of productivity tools and telephony solutions working to power a complete communication and collaboration platform for your users. It empowers them to seamlessly send and receive messages, calls, and documents. When you get down to it, UCaaS presents a unique solution to a business challenge many customers see today, particularly in their shift to largely remote workforces.
As many traditional work environments have shut down to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, remote work solutions are in increasingly high demand—and it’s likely to stay that way. In a Gartner CFO survey, about 74 percent of companies stated that they’d permanently transition to more remote work post-covid.
Mindful of this reality, it’s a great time for MSPs to add UCaaS to their portfolio of managed services. However, before you embark on a new journey to become a UCaaS provider, you’ll need to understand your clients’ needs, choose the right solution for their business and develop a plan for how you’ll bring real value to your offering.
The first step to start reselling UCaaS: understand your clients’ needs
This is where real discovery takes place with your customer. Ask them what their intentions are and why they’re requesting this solution for their business transformation. Yes, COVID-19 is certainly a reason; many businesses are scaling back because of the economic implications of the pandemic. But dig deeper to understand why their business needs to adapt quickly. Is it because they need technology that scales with their business growth or decline, because they need an expert that can deploy and manage this type of solution, or because they just need help with overall efficiency? Get to the bottom of their pain points!
One of an MSP’s main functions is to make changes to customers’ IT environment as painless as possible, while simultaneously minimizing rejection and increasing utilization of new tools and processes. The addition of a UCaaS solution can help your customers stay connected and create more flexibility in their business processes. Using any type of device, whether desktop or mobile, your clients can stay connected and access to Microsoft 365 applications and files from anywhere. UCaaS is flexible in that it increases both productivity and the end-customer experience by letting your client reach more people in the most convenient ways possible. It’s an excellent solution for MSP’s to show value for their clients by ultimately making their lives easier.
Choose the right solution
Once you’ve answered your customers’ burning questions and have sufficient details about their business needs, you’re ready to prescribe a solution that can solve their unique challenges. This part is a lot easier if you work with a partner with relevant expertise and resources to support you. Sherweb offers a few different ways to deploy UCaaS and other VoIP services for your customer’s organization, tailored with expert support and resources to help your business grow. Here are a few examples of what we can provide:
- Managed Team Voice Sherweb leverages your customer’s existing telephony engine, provides white-glove onboarding and support and supplies an expanded list of compatible devices.
- Microsoft Teams & Microsoft Business Voice With single portal for chat, video and voice calls and collaboration, this option is good for early adopters of Teams, for MSPs with a nice array of Microsoft certifications, and for those providers and customers wanting to create an entirely native Microsoft solution.
- Bridging on-prem and cloud Giving clients the ability to connect Teams with their on-prem PBX, this option is good for MSPs with budget-conscious customers, or those looking for a way to cross-sell managed PBX.
- Cloud PBX Gives customers a full phone system in the cloud, with advanced forwarding and IVR capabilities. This option is perfect for small businesses that want something simple but scalable.
Bring value to your offering
UCaaS is the perfect value add if you need a cross-sell or upsell opportunity to increase the monthly recurring revenue (MRR) in a customer account. Sherweb’s ‘bridging on-prem and cloud’ capability is a great example of that. If your customers have anything in the Microsoft 365 suite, Teams is also good solution to pitch to customers.
MSPs can add further value to their offerings by fostering a scalable environment for customers. By adding more products and creating a more holistic solution for a client’s IT environment, your business with them can grow along with them and continue to adapt to their unique needs over time. This generates increasing revenues, but also makes it more difficult for clients to separate their business from your services.
Additional value-added services that MSPs can provide to clients via UCaaS include network assessments, user training, continual support, managed onboarding and deployment, IVR and auto-attendant assistance—the list goes on. It all starts with the right partner!
Explore our UCaaS Insights Series for more resources on how to start reselling UCaaS and add value to your MSP offering with voice solutions.
