Background
InspHire is the world's leading supplier of Windows software solutions to the rental and asset management industry. Their systems are used in over 300 companies worldwide, including the UK, Holland and Australia. The company have spent years developing a client server model for their applications and have recently embarked on a hosted version targeted at smaller retail outlets.
The Challenge
Broadband is an enabling technology for InspHire and is not their core business. They use it to remotely access client installation for trouble shooting, patches and software upgrades. Their clients are increasingly using it to access centrally-held software and data. However when the link failed they had no way of investigating whether the problem was with the broadband, the telephone line or the router. The customer would call the ISP that had supplied the service who would then raise a ticket with BT. It could take a day for the ISP to get back to them and even then it would usually be to ask further questions and not to resolve the issue.
Furthermore the process of placing new orders was clumsy and unpredictable. InspHire did not know when the line would go live and often engineers would turn up on site only to find that either the broadband had not gone live or the router was missing. InspHire's ISP paid them a small monthly commission, however the contract was between the ISP and InspHire's customer. The ISP was able to contact their customers at any time with telesales campaigns and email marketing. InspHire did not particularly fear the ISP as a competitor but their involvement made customer management fragmented. The ISP billed the customer directly and could withdraw their commissions with only limited notice.
The fragmented provisioning process was causing engineering visits to be aborted on site and customer services were spending 20% of their time receiving progress calls from customers wanting to know when their service was going live. The commission earned for each line sold was not covering the cost of provisioning them. There was also no contract between InspHire and the ISP to formalise the relationship.
InspHire customers received branded bills each month from the ISP containing new hosted products such as hosted exchange and hosted VoIP. Managed hosting was becoming a core competence of InspHire and the company saw a potential conflict from their partner.
The Solution
InspHire discontinued their relationship with the incumbent ISP and signed up as a white label Griffin MOPS customer. They were able to set up their own product packages including a range of routers that they were familiar with, that suited their applications and they felt comfortable supporting. Now they are able to make a good margin on the monthly recurring broadband rental and on the installation and routers. The service is own branded and the end customers belong solely to InspHire. The revenue from broadband lines is growing and contributes to the overall value of the business as well as the bottom line profit figure.
The Benefits
MOPS also gives InspHire direct access to online tools for diagnosing and isolating faults. In the event that InspHire require a BT engineer they can book an appointment through the system, confident in the knowledge that the fault is with BT and not with themselves or the router. A process which previously took two days now takes 10 minutes.
All new activations and migrations to InspHire are live within five days as apposed to any time up to three weeks from order placement. The event triggers in MOPS automatically keep all parties up to date with the progress of each order via email, this has reduced customer progress calls to almost zero. Griffin dispatch pre-configured routers to the customer the day before the broadband service goes live.
"We are delighted with our MOPS system. By signing up with Griffin we are able to diagnose faults directly, protect our customer base and add value to our business."
Chris Barnett - InspHire