Chess identified a growing need for something more for its resellers to offer. It wanted to launch a product for Partners to offer that would enable them to develop their fixed line proposition in order to minimise customer churn and turned its attention to the increasing popularity of bundled packages.
Ofcom’s analysis found 82 per cent of SMEs cited the ability to source all telecoms services from a single supplier as an important requirement in their purchase decision and a high proportion saw the provision of a single bundle of all required services as an important factor in their choice of supplier, particularly among medium sized businesses.
Chess recognised that offering multiple fixed line products as a single package would reduce customers’ tendency to switch to another supplier – the more products and services they subscribe to, the more disruption switching causes. It is, therefore in the reseller’s interest to offer multiple resilient and reliable products and services, cost effectively on a single monthly paperless bill, marketing the package as an efficiency improving solution for fast growth SMEs.
Chess’ research led to the development and launch of The Big Three – a bundled package providing customers with business class high speed broadband, digital line rental and Chess’ 2006 FCS award winning call plan – FREE2TALK.
The bundled package gives customers many of the benefits of converged voice and data communications, without the significant outlay and technological expertise required for full-scale systems overhauls.
Chess’ is launching The Big 3 exclusively for channel partners to offer. It is designed to enable partners to easily keep their customers up to date with market changes and adapt their product offering to fit their customers’ changing technological requirements.
Offering a bundled package like this to SMEs, means that as the customers’ businesses grow, SMARTER partners can gradually increase the complexity of their converged solutions, integrating new technology as it is developed and when the customer is ready for it. This will further increase the ‘stickiness’ of customers. As their communications technology relies more on complimentarity they will generally be looking to reduce the number of suppliers they use due to problems associated with networks interfacing with one another.
In recognition of this, Chess needed to ensure that the broadband aspect of the bundle was future proof. Chess’ network had to be sophisticated enough to be able to deal with increasingly revolutionary applications, as well as affordable enough to appeal to smaller businesses.
Chess invested in a high speed and resilient broadband network that is reserved exclusively for businesses. The network is future-proof and more than capable of dealing with the new applications that will require QOS (Quality of Service – required for resilient voice traffic) and COS (Class of Service – required for voice and data prioritisation) it seeks to deliver to these customers as the technologies evolve.
In FREE2TALK, Chess already had a product that offered businesses many of the benefits of VoIP such as free calls between sites, so the addition of a high speed business class broadband and digital line effectively creates a hassle free converged solution for partners to offer that would not require customers to become IT experts.
The Big Three is available for all SMARTER Partners to offer.