Technology Advisors Will Invest in Closing a Massive Professional Services Gap
By James Anderson
The technology advisor channel emerged decades ago out of an opportunity to plug holes in an extremely fragmented telecom landscape. Years later, agents may be stepping up again by deepening post-sales support for their customers.
The conventional understanding of a technology broker is that they are just that – a broker. In the world of telecom, these partners traditionally focus on sourcing technology services for their customers. They pair their knowledge of their vendor partners with their knowledge of their customer’s environment to matchmake the right solutions. Following the matchmaking process, the chosen vendor takes over the customer life cycle, handling deployment, management and billing. However, partners remain very much invested in how the vendor treats the customers, considering that they earn a monthly commission and stake their credibility on the provider’s customer support. And in many cases, that customer support is failing.
Many agents tell Channel Futures off the record that slow and haphazard implementations are causing headaches for their customers. And this lousy deployment isn’t coming from underequipped vendors; some of the biggest UCaaS and CCaaS providers in the channel are earning failing grades. Agents are firing their vendors and turning to those they truly trust with their customers.
And perhaps it’s not so much the providers dropping the ball as it is a painful exposure of a gap in the agent model. After all, advisors have proclaimed themselves as the single-back-to-pat for their customers. Why then are they not ensuring customer outcomes throughout the full technology life cycle? The simple and obvious answer is staffing. Most agencies started as one- or two-person shops founded by former sales reps. They simply lacked the resources to invest deeply in project management and operations, especially if vendors were willing to handle those aspects of the business. But with private equity and outside investment flooding into partners and mass layoffs reducing vendor headcount, the technology advisor model might be primed and ready for an evolution.
Some of the largest players in the agent market say they’re doing more and more to support the full technology life cycle. That includes private equity-backed Bluewave as well as long-established firms ARG and Advantage Communications Group. At the same time, professional services firms like Inflow CX and PPT Solutions have positioned themselves as value-adds for agents that can’t actually hire someone to do full CCaaS implementations. Moreover, some vendors are backing the shift to partner professional services, with cloud communications providers like Dialpad financially rewarding partners that tackle deployment. Channel Futures forecasts that more of these vendor incentives will emerge to reward partners who can take work off their plate.
The agent channel has built a lesser-known-yet-highly attractive procurement model for customers, but its gaps loom large as technology advisors compete with service-focused partners such as SIs and MSPs nudging their way. Adding more pre-sale and post-sale services gives agents an added advantage, not to mention an entirely new revenue stream that doesn’t depend on the whims of provider pricing. But more importantly, the expansion will further agents’ role as their clients’ trusted technology partner.
