Access4
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Jul 10, 2024
Access4
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Jul 10, 2024
Access4
|
Jul 10, 2024
Access4
|
Jul 10, 2024
Melbourne, 10 July 2024 – Cicom is a managed IT services provider based in the Northern Rivers region of NSW. Its history is not dissimilar to many computer-based businesses in regional Australia, beginning as a retailer and repairer to residential and small business users.
Its transition into the managed IT services space started about 10 years ago, at a time when the model was relatively nascent outside of the cities. At the point that half its business came from managed services, the company rebranded to its present trading name, discontinued its traditional retail focus and became a full B2B managed services provider.
Reducing own telco costs reveals opportunity
It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention, and that’s true of how Cicom came to be in the business of managed telephony.
Frustrated at the price it was being charged for business telephony services, and a lack of commercial alternatives, Cicom’s Founder Clinton Carey decided to DIY instead, setting up a 3CX phone system on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and sourcing “a couple of SIP trunks through another supplier.” Once live, its telephony costs dropped by two-thirds.
Carey sensed a business opportunity. “We thought, ‘We can do this for other people as well’,” he said. “We just kept continuing with what we’d done for ourselves as the model to spin up telephony services for customers.”
That meant setting up a GCP instance, a hosted 3CX environment and sourcing SIP trunks for each customer. Cicom also started using a telecom billing solution intended for MSPs so it could charge for the service offering. “We had four components from four different suppliers that we were managing,” Carey said.
As business grew, that management complexity became unwieldy. With around 30 managed telephony environments, the company had 30 different sets of GCP credentials, and the same amount of 3CX subscriptions and environments to provision, manage and update. “You have to go into a customer’s own instance to make any changes or additions on their PBX,” Carey explained. “When they’ve all got different logins, that becomes cumbersome over time.”
Carey started to rethink the model, identifying the need for a ‘single pane of glass’ through which a customer’s telephony service could be provisioned and managed. This was seen as crucial to enhancing the serviceability of existing customers, while creating a platform to sustainably grow this business into the future.
“When you’re small like us, with only four staff, being efficient is pretty important. In that environment we’d rather be working on fine-tuning those systems for customers, making fast additions and changes, and just increasing the level of service we offer, rather than fumbling our way through products that take our time away from really being responsive to customer needs. We also wanted to spend more time selling, and for the provisioning of those new services to be quick and easy.”
The value of partnership
Cicom had decided to transform the technology stack underpinning its managed telephony services, but was yet to determine how. A cold call from Access4 would change that.
In his line of work, Carey receives many such calls. “In our game we’re used to cold calls. You’re trying to be sold everything every day and it does get a bit annoying at times,” he said.
But the Access4 call immediately set itself apart from the rest. “It was something a little bit different and I picked up on it very quickly. There was something behind it – it wasn’t just a sales call. They were looking for a partner – you could tell. There’s a difference,” Carey said. “I liked the idea that they were looking for partners that fitted their environment.”
The ensuing conversation allowed both Cicom and Access4 to gauge the other’s suitability. For Cicom, it was refreshing to be approached by a provider that understood the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of servicing regional Australian businesses and their customers.
“One thing I would say that is different from other vendors is Access4 sees value in regional commerce. That’s a big thing. Some of the larger metropolitan players have no idea where we even are. The fact Access4 sees value in servicing 30-odd customers gives you a bit of hope that your business has value, and incentive to go out there and have a crack at growing it. You feel like you’ve got someone there that sees you as a valued partner, so you feel valued and validated.”
Comfort and confidence
With a partnership agreement in place, then came the practicalities: transitioning 30-something customers to Access4’s cloud-hosted telephony solution, and moving the sales pipeline, provisioning and billing processes over to Access4’s SASBOSS® platform.
What shone through for Cicom during this period was Access4’s intimate understanding of the transition process, including the kinds of challenges that commonly arise. To free up as much of Cicom’s time to manage customer-facing aspects of transition, Access4 took care of the behind-the-scenes deployment and onboarding processes, including the replication of configuration settings from 3CX to Access4 via the SASBOSS® platform. “It was something we didn’t have to do,” Carey said.
The division of effort during this time was “intuitive” and gave Carey confidence that if and where any challenges were encountered, “there was backing” and commitment from Access4 to navigate issues or concerns.
Weekly meetings continued throughout the transition period and beyond to ensure that Cicom and Access4 remained engaged on partnership opportunities and growing the Cicom business.
Self-service is the key
Cicom set out to simplify the way it provided managed telephony services, and the SASBOSS® platform means that has now been achieved. The company deployed demonstration environments within SASBOSS® to understand how to use the self-service platform.
“If SASBOSS® wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have gotten the partnership with Access4 over the line,” Carey said. “It’s a single pane of glass through which we can do basically 99% of the work ourselves. That makes a difference.”
Carey said that constant improvements are being made to the platform by Access4 to further enhance its usability and utility.
Growing revenue and the business
With Access4 now underpinning all existing hosted telephony customers, attention is now turning to what Cicom can do with the time that’s now been freed up through the transition.
Carey said there is now an opportunity to expand the number of customers using the managed telephony service, allowing Cicom to “spread its wings into areas of northern NSW that we haven’t been in.” There is also more time available to work with existing customers to potentially help them to adopt other managed IT services in the Cicom portfolio.
“Access4 and voice and data are probably one-tenth of our business, so there’s a lot of other products there that we can sell. We definitely see this relationship [with Access4] as a way to get a foot in the door with customers and to create a relationship with them, before we show them what other services we have.”
Access4
|
Jul 10, 2024
Our partners onboard in one day and once set up can provision within the hour. Equip your business with unified communications and start growing your recurring profit pool.
