O2’s new partner programme has been designed to learn from the current Centres of Excellence which have successfully driven O2 to number one in the SME market in recent years. Partners who join the new programme will receive benefits and rewards for working more closely with O2.
The programme has been built on insight from the fixed and IT reseller market, and enables O2 to deliver a more flexible service to wholesale partners. As well as enabling fixed and IT resellers that do not offer mobile services to take advantage of a white label billing solution for mobile voice and data.
The first three partners O2 plan to work with are: Total Ltd, Daisy Mobile and Fidelity Group. It is expected more partners will be invited to join the programme in the coming months.
All the partners who join the Joined up Communications Channel Partner Programme will continue to service their existing fixed customer bases, while also offering a white labelled mobile service to their own partners.
The appointed partners will act as aggregators for O2 and offer a tiered level of support to fixed and IT resellers wanting to sell mobile:
A full white label billing solution with Call Data Records (CDR) for partners wanting to manage and bill for mobile end to end An assisted sales programme for partners wanting to bring a mobile specialist into a customer to help them A referral programme for partners wanting to pass a lead and receive a fee on closure
This will allow IT value added resellers (VARs) and fixed line resellers, that want to be able to offer mobile voice and data solutions, to do so using their own billing platform and brand, thereby retaining ownership of the customer. This will open the market up to a wider range of partners and allow a fully Joined up solution to be provided to customers on one bill from a single partner.
David Plumb, Head of SME Sales for O2, said: “We have been looking for some time at ways in which we could engage further with fixed and IT resellers who have very strong relationships with their customers through the hardware and services they provide. When we launched our “Joined up” packages last year we were keen to explore new ways of working that could give us more ways to sell complete solutions.
“By launching the Joined up Communications Channel Partner Programme we can give wholesale partners the best of both worlds, taking the learnings from our Centre of Excellence programme, while helping them to sell mobile to their own fixed customer base.”