Ruy Franco (Access4)
After experiencing poor support from its former telco provider, Wollongong-based IT and telecommunications company IT&T decided it was time to make a switch.
The company embarked on a new partnership with unified communications (UC)-as-a-service provider, Access4 via its dealer relationship with CommsPlus, migrating more than 100 customers across in the process.
Access4 announced its deal with CommsPlus Distribution in 2017.
The Access4 platform allows the provisioning of cloud UC and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking services, while enabling device procurement with zero touch provisioning of Panasonic handsets via its proprietary provisioning system, SASBOSS.
Not only did IT&T experience poor support services from its former telco provider, but it saw it didn’t really own the customer relationship, therefore not maintaining an ongoing revenue stream from telco sales, but also service provisioning took a long time.
IT&T CEO Serge Niazi said that the company was making no ongoing margin or revenue from telco sales.
“Worse still, there was a complete lack of support locally, no communication, non-existent pre-sales support, and we had to call or email multiple times to get anything done,” Niazi said.
IT&T previously maintained a referral-based arrangement with their telco provider, where they would sell a PBX and connect it via the provider’s SIP trunks.
And despite doing the sale and customer management, the relationship was owned by the telco, putting IT&T in a risky position of losing the customer.
Additionally, their previous provider decided to stop accepting new orders for the platform they were on, and Niazi had three customers that were expecting SIP trunks which were not able to be connected.
This is where Access4 stepped in.
“Although we considered other providers, our existing relationship with CommsPlus coupled with how easy it was to use the Access4 system made our decision simple,” he said.
Access4 sales and marketing director Ruy Franco added that within a day, IT&T were set up as a partner and were able to provision SIP trunks for customers, solving SIP trunk issues in the process.
Since then, Access4 has put together a migration team for IT&T, which involved planning the porting of all customer numbers from the previous platform to Access4, setting up for all SIP trunks in the Access4 platform and migrating PBXs.
“We took two weeks to complete all the planning and ran a couple of test migrations during the planning phase to ensure we had all the information we needed and that IT&T’s engineers were familiar with the SIP configuration changes required,” Franco said.
The move reduced IT&T’s overheads, and quickly transitioned the ongoing revenue from the telco to IT&T.
In becoming an Access4 partner, Niazi said it has been allocated an account manager who provides training, sales and technical support, as well as access to an onsite developer.
“We have also benefited financially and mentally," he added. "Dealing with previous provider was very difficult and stressful and it was bringing our staff morale and mental health down."
