Strategic Path interviews Rob McCabe, Getronics Manager of Communication Services
"Delivering unified comms to the market"
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Strategic Path interviews Rob McCabe, Getronics Manager of Communication Services
Q: Systems integrators have the necessary tools and internal structures to deal with the demanding non-telephony and non-IT side of the unified communications value chain, that is, the business integration. How has Getronics changed throughout the years to come up to date with the new requirements to play in the UC space?
A: Getronics has always built its business on delivering quality solutions that address customers’ specific business issues. We primarily sell on reference and reputation rather than generic branding or name recognition. To ensure that we can reference each customer, we employ highly skilled UC resources, mature practices and are flexible in order to meet the ever changing needs of our customers and the market. We pride ourselves on business-focussed solutions consultancy, meaning that we are committed to fully understanding our customer business objectives and challenges in order to deliver the best solution.
Over the past three years, Getronics has built a dedicated UC practice of more than 30 senior consultants with extensive experience and credibility in the Australian market. We have also built a key partner strategy working with specialist software integrators, call centre consultants and trainers to ensure we are deploying solutions that deliver the unique value to our customers, over and above competitor offerings.
Q: Australian IT channels have been saturated by multiple vendor products over the past couple of years. Various telephony equipment vendors and partners have complained that their sales channels have no particular sales focus and are trying to be ‘all things to all people’.
What is Getronics view on this issue?
A: Getronics has specifically focussed on UC for a number of years. As a result we have developed a high level of experience and expertise in this field. This expertise coupled with the rapid technology development in UC enables Getronics to continue to offer innovative ways for customers to enhance business performance and lower operational IT costs. Our vendor strategy is based on a number of factors including innovation, market share and support capability. Getronics is a Gold Partner of Cisco and Microsoft, and has key strategic partners such as ARC, Avotus, and Sony in order to deliver complete UC solutions.
Q: How is Getronics working with customers to prepare them for UC?
A: Our dedicated UC team has a strong marketing and education focus that compliments the UC sales, delivery and support resources. For Getronics to be successful in UC, we must be able to articulate the business benefits of deploying UC to our customers. This is done through all aspects of the practice from targeted seminars and campaigns, solution demonstrations, training courses and technical briefings. One of our key strengths is our references and we use these to help educate potential customers by providing real examples of how UC has delivered business value to their organisation.
Q: Unified comms brings IT and communications issues to IT staff and also non-IT staff. How has your engagement with customers changed over time with the introduction of UC?
A: When IP telephony was first introduced to the market, the uptake was mainly by organisations that wanted to be seen as leaders in innovation. However, we have gone beyond that phase as the market has developed. Business engagement is now critical in positioning, selling and delivering UC solutions. Getronics has for some time recognised successful UC deployment requires a detailed understanding of a customers business and the impact on its employees and customers. For example, integrating call centre, receptionist consoles and accounting systems requires buy-in from business stakeholders, human resources and finance areas of an organisation to successfully deliver on real business objectives. Since the millennium, Getronics is finding that customer business IT practices appear to themselves be refocusing to a mindset of serving the business, rather than technology adoption. Therefore, IT departments are now encouraging joint internal business engagement when delivering integrated applications, which is essential for successful UC delivery.
In addition, businesses today have a need to justify deployment of UC based on ROI and business value. Therefore, Getronics has developed a TCO model that facilitates this. The typical cliché is “not if, but when” for deploying UC, so this service has proved invaluable for customers in understanding their current position, and what is needed to validate a business case in the future.
Q: How is Getronics working with next wave communications solution providers such as Microsoft?
A: As an ICT solutions provider, it is our duty to provide our customers with a UC solution that enables them to communicate more effectively to improve productivity and reduce costs. With Microsoft’s entry into the UC space, Getronics is placed in an enviable position in the market. As a long-term strategic partner of both Microsoft and Cisco, Getronics can offer customers solutions that leverage the best from both vendors.
Potential UC customers are now becoming more focussed on the user experience rather than cost benefits like infrastructure consolidation. Therefore, we are refocussing our efforts on the user interface and are working with our strategic partners to offer the user experience that the customer wants, rather than just a vendor choice. Customers also need to provide information services to cater for new generation of employees as an employment differentiator as well as a business tool.
Q: Could you provide some examples of an end-to-end unified communications project which involved both technical staff and non-technical business oriented staff?
A: Getronics has deployed over 50 new UC solutions in Australia in the last 2 years, all of which are referenceable. We have delivered UC solutions for government organisations such as New South Wales Office of State Revenue (OSR), health and pharmaceutical organisations such as RESMED and Roche and corporate organisations with critical sales and customer service functions such as SMART communications.
In all of these projects, Getronics engaged the business stakeholders in order capture core business objectives in the sales and planning phases. We were then able to measure our solution delivery on business success factors, rather than technical features and functions. For example, OSRs’ core business objectives included enhancing revenue performance, forging powerful stakeholder relationships and ensuring continual renewal.
OSR is the financial revenue gathering arm of NSW government, and is the result of combining several agency lines of business from infringement processing and debt recovering to land and payroll tax functions. Getronics delivered a complete UC solution for 2,000 users across seven sites (including a 300-seat virtual contact centre). The UC solution delivered on the objectives by consolidated contact centre operation allowing OSR to report on combined KPIs automatically. The contact centre, along with other UC tools provided a single telephony experience for customers and employees across the organisation.
Q: What differentiates Getronics from the other channels/systems integrators servicing the Australian market?
A: The differentiator for Getronics is the combination of our customer-centric approach, our ability to provide a complete lifecycle of services, and our pool of specialist skills in the unified comms area.
With all of our customer engagements, Getronics takes a view to creating a long-term partnership rather than simply a short-term engagement. This is evident in the results of our recent customer satisfaction survey, which indicated that 100 per cent of respondents to the question indicated that they would continue to work with Getronics in the future. Developing customer intimacy as a differentiator doesn’t come by accident – Getronics has a number of initiatives in place to ensure the longevity of our customer relationships. These initiatives include loyalty programmes directed at our key customers, as well as leadership impact and cultural development programs focussed on our staff.
The dedicated unified communications team we have in place in Australia and their ability to leverage the skills and expertise of our global counterparts also helps Getronics to present a strong value proposition to the Australian market. In addition to our impressive capability to design and deploy a unified communications implementation, Getronics also has people, processes and tools in place to provide end-to-end management of the implementation.
Q: How do you see the future go-to-market strategies changing?
A: Today is all about business process improvement and productivity gains. It is therefore critical for Getronics to have an intimate understanding of our customers business and thus provide solutions that improve the way our customers do business thus providing a competitive advantage.
Additionally as the next generation of workers arrive, they bring a culture of technological expectation and a view that unified services are just a part of everyday life. This new wave of users will expect, unified solutions and innovation and this will put increasing demands on Integrators to deliver new and unique solutions.
Through the Getronics culture, capabilities and a nimble business model we will be able to stay ahead of the field. We will continue to listen to our customers and market demands. We will also continue to be ready for change as new technologies emerge, and most importantly we will continue to have the right people to deliver the business solutions our customers must have.
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