Source: Comms Dealer December 2009
The 'ISP in a box' product is still going strong. Andrew Dickinson, Sales & Marketing Director at Griffin Internet, commented: "Before Griffin's 'ISP in a box' resellers would generally refer their customer to an ISP (usually BT) often in exchange for a finder's-fee. Pretty quickly ISPs that also sold direct to enterprises realised that these referral schemes were a great way into selling other communications products to these customers. Resellers found themselves competing with ISPs that had turned from being suppliers to competitors."
The problem with reseller schemes at that time, says Dickinson, was that many schemes were not truly white label and gave visibility to the ISP within their reseller's customer base. "More of an issue was that provisioning broadband for customers was still time consuming and unreliable," he said. "Without full access to all the fault management tools First Call Clear (FCC) rates on reseller's first line support desks plummeted, creating dissatisfied customers and additional cost. Deals for calls, lines and PBXs worth thousands of pounds were being jeopardised by a product worth only a few pounds margin a month."
Griffin's approach is to integrate entirely into its suppliers, not only at a network level but also at an operational and reporting level. "Many thousands of transactions are executed by Partners on our MOPS (Managed Online Provisioning System) every month and we don't touch any of them," added Dickinson. "Investment in automation is considerable - we have a team of 12 developers working 100 per cent on MOPS - but in the long run this saves us and our Partners in manpower, and increases efficiency and customer satisfaction. Where the Partner is new to broadband, or wants to scale-up quickly, we offer a branded first line product that can be transferred back to the Partner at any time once they have the critical mass and skills required to support it themselves."
Selling their own broadband creates more margin for a reseller, reduces churn and increases the overall value of their business. Typically, resellers have found that they can halve churn by selling PSTN lines to CPS customers and they can halve that again by selling that customer a broadband line. "Typical penetration of a Griffin Partner of broadband into a calls and lines base is around 40 per cent, and we run specific marketing programmes to help Partners to convert," said Dickinson. "Over the years we have learned what works when it comes to getting existing customers to migrate their broadband. We run regular training sessions as well offering white label ecast templates, and collateral."