TalkTalk Business has benefited from tIPcall’s channel expertise, including its Union Street designed partner portal.
The background
Few could have failed to notice TalkTalk Business’ resurgence in the channel. First came the acquisition of leading SIP and hosted carrier, tIPicall, swiftly followed by the launch of a highly disruptive portfolio of services and promotions. This included free SIP and extremely competitive pricing on voice and connectivity services for channel partners. These actions demonstrated a clear intent to not simply disrupt the wholesale SIP market, but to revolutionise it.
Acquiring tIPicall formed a key part of TalkTalk Business’ channel strategy. Whereas TalkTalk Business has long held a strong position in the high-end SIP market, supporting large scale deployments of business grade SIP to enterprise level customers, tIPicall possessed unrivalled channel expertise. This, combined with a well-established partner base and a broad portfolio of channel focused solutions, made tIPicall the perfect partner for TalkTalk Business.
Crucially, tIPicall’s innovative range of SIP provisioning solutions were backed by the MOSAIX™ provisioning portal, one of the most advanced self-serve ordering portals available to resellers and wholesalers. According to Jon Nowell, Head of Product Management at TalkTalk Business, the MOSAIX portal has helped to define the TalkTalk Business proposition.
Union Street’s solution
Nowell explains, “It was key for us that we had a fantastic provisioning portal to offer our partner community. One that would not only enable us to offer a disruptive proposition to the market, but that also had customer centricity at its core. On top of this we needed something that had the scale for growth that we anticipated. The depth of capability, the ease of use of the portal, combined with the TalkTalk Business proposition gives our partners the tools they needed to take full advantage of the growth opportunities in the SIP market.
“One of the core strengths of our portal is that it fully integrates with TalkTalk Business’ provisioning systems as well as those of certain third party suppliers. This makes it possible for our channel partners to build bespoke quotes with pinpoint accuracy on pricing, then place subsequent orders quickly and efficiently without ever having to go outside the portal. It’s a complete end to end solution.”
Nowell cites productivity increases as another benefit of TalkTalk Business’ provisioning portal. “In today’s increasingly competitive environment, resellers need maximum productivity from their suppliers when they’re placing orders or managing services for customers. Poor productivity is a profitability drain and the hidden costs of managing consumer services with a subpar solution can soon mount up. This is why we’ve worked closely with Union Street to maximise the efficiencies of the online journey, eliminating a lot of the time consuming toing and froing by providing everything a reseller needs to place orders.
“Our Union Street designed portal doesn’t just offer efficiency benefits at the point of order. We’ve also provided the tools to efficiently manage queries and updates. Real time information and real time updates are all available within the portal so there’s no wasted time spent calling up to chase an order. This gives our partners freedom and independence, putting them in control.
According to Nowell, there’s no doubt that the speed and accuracy offered by the portal will deliver a competitive advantage to TalkTalk Business’ channel partners. “Because of its speed and the ease of ordering, our portal enables resellers to give their end user customers a great experience in the early life of a contract and going forward. Compared to traditional voice services, such as ISDN and CPS,