Case Study— Nashua Mobile tender to customer for VOIP services

Description of business need

You do not know what you do not know. Many VOIP service providers do not have an accurate picture of their customers [or potential customers] monthly call patterns.

For a service provider of VOIP services to put together a proposal on VOIP, the service provider must understand the customers business need 100%. This includes all TYPE’s of expenditure [Telkom/cell phones/inter branch] per branch, including

· Cost implications of inter branch calls
· Validating the business need for VOIP
· Monthly call patterns in Talktime, Billed Minutes and Rands.
· Number of concurrent calls per branch
· Effective Rates for Peak and Off Peak times

DataRoom provided Nashua Mobile and their customer with -

· A complete set of reports highlighting the precise business need across the group of companies and all its branches. The DataRoom “Telecoms Report Suite” was used.
· An accurate analysis of call pattern information that allowed
· the configuration of infrastructure per branch
· An understanding of call patterns per branch
· A detailed proposal to their customer for a nationwide VOIP solution over multiple companies and branches, over a large geographical area

Situation

In May 2007, Nashua Mobile approached DataRoom for assistance in tendering for a VOIP solution to an existing LCR client. The service provider was the incumbent supplier of LCR [least cost routing of cell phone calls] and cell phones.

Other service providers were offering their customer VOIP and Nashua Mobile wished to differentiate them against their competition, understand the business need accurately and ensure that they retained the customer. They ran a very real risk of losing their customer and the LCR revenue to a competitor if they did not address the VOIP requirement.

The service provider and their sales team did not have the capacity to perform the required call analysis and understood the importance of coming to grips with the customers business need. Furthermore, they did not have the skill set / tools to professionally analyse and understand the existing environment.

Solution

Using supplier billing and call detailed records, a thorough analysis of all call patterns by company, branch, region and all TYPE’s of expenditure was completed using DataRoom’s Telecom Report Suite.

Benefits

On completion of the analysis performed by DataRoom, the Nashua Mobile sales teams had a thorough understanding of the current call patterns for total voice and infrastructure requirements. The tender was put together based on the understanding of their customers business need.

There was no guess work involved in understanding the infrastructure requirements.

The sales team and the product manager understood exactly how many concurrent calls needed to be catered for each company, branch and TYPE of spend based on historical call patterns over the last 3 months.

Furthermore, by re-rating each call made over the last 3 months on the new VOIP rate, the service provider could accurately predict the RAND savings going forward and the resultant return on investment for his client.

Through the skills/tool set provided by the DataRoom reporting, this service provider was able to be viewed by the customer as specialist in voice communication [including VOIP] and no longer just a LCR / PBX supplier.

The customer knows uses Nashua Mobile for all their voice requirements and are expanding the initiative to other companies in the group.