To help partners target larger business customers, the O2 Enterprise Centre of Excellence will allow them to enhance their offerings with O2’s corporate expertise. Specific benefits of the programme include pre-sales support, post sale implementation support, dedicated bid support, a dedicated O2 Business Manager and service support. Partners will also gain access to marketing collateral, along with full access to O2’s customer satisfaction programme for partners’ own corporate customers, as well as Enterprise Centre of Excellence accreditation. Finally the programme will offer partners stability around annual resigns being available for the tenure of the customer contract, aiming to give long term confidence for both customer & partner alike.
To qualify for the O2 Enterprise Centre of Excellence, partners will need to meet a set criteria, including a number of existing corporate customers, connection targets, dedicated 24/7 service management and a structured customer satisfaction programme.
Current research demonstrates that there is a clear opportunity in the 100 + handset space but that conversion rates for partners are low with many network operators taking this business directly. The O2 Enterprise Centre of Excellence aims to greatly improve partners’ chances of winning enterprise customers.
“This third O2 Centre of Excellence is further evidence of our commitment to investing in the channel to help our partners grow their businesses,” said Ben Dowd, General Manager – Business Sales, O2 UK. “Rather than simply trying to take a bigger slice of the enterprise market, we feel that by working together with our partners, we can grow the overall market.”
Nokia's UK General Manager Simon Ainslie said: "It is good to see operators stepping up their activities with the indirect channel around more complex mobility solutions, in driving this key area O2 have defined a collaborative and focused strategy around voice and data which Nokia have been delighted to support”
The O2 Centres of Excellence are part of O2’s UK business strategy to take a more IT-focused approach to corporate and SME sales. Each Centre of Excellence is specifically tailored to the area of business it covers, and aims to bring together experts in these areas to offer integrated end-to-end offerings to customers. Earlier this year, O2 launched the M2M and Data Centres of Excellence.
Ben Dowd continued: “O2 and its partners are already seeing the benefits of the Centres of Excellence. In particular, the data Centre of Excellence has allowed us to increase data penetration and ARPU far ahead of expectations. We look forward to working closely with our partners to further take advantage of the enterprise market.”