01732 759725 46 Q&A up; we’ve got people using marketing development funds; and we’ve got people feeding back to us about how we shape stuff, how we do stuff, which is really important. Our job is to continue the exponential growth in that partner programme and to make it one of the primary points of interaction between us. That isn’t because we don’t want to see people or talk to people; it’s because it is the easiest way for them to work with BT and self-serve with BT. We’re not Amazon yet. We’ve got work to do but it is a major focus for us. TR: What sort of metrics do you use to measure the success of your programme. Is it just the amount of business you’re doing or is it the number of touch points in each transaction? GJ: Business is obviously an easy one. We also do a net satisfaction survey, which we run every month. There are about eight sub sections on that programme so we can tell how our billing’s doing, we can tell how our partner programme’s going; we can tell how good our provide and repair is. In addition to those metrics, we run specific feedback sessions on the partner programme. When we’re looking to develop things or create ideas, we will take a subsection of partners or ask for volunteers from the programme. We’ll take vox pops and feedback from partners on an ongoing basis: what is it you want to see? Does this work? We have a multi-faceted approach. TR: Is BT Wholesale working with the same types of partner that you’ve always worked with or are you broadening your approach? GJ: We are definitely broadening our approach to customers to capitalise on current trends in the market. The rise of Hosted Voice is definitely one; and there’s a new set of bandwidth-hungry people out there that want 10 Gigabit, 100 Gigabit connectivity that criss-crosses the country to link up data centres and to link up cloud, so we’re seeing new opportunity there. We’re also seeing new opportunities with VARs that are slightly more IT-centric than telco-centric. We recently launched a hosted Teams service (WHC Teams Direct Connect) that obviously plugs into Microsoft Teams. So you’re starting to see people that were on the LAN or the WAN or the desktop work with us because they want to create a voice capability for Teams and everything else. So we are widening our base. We’re also seeing an increase in people wanting what we would call machine to machine or mobile data. There’s more interest from companies around how to create those capabilities, how to share data without necessarily using fixed infrastructure. And there’s definitely growth from what we would call brand extenders – companies that have a good brand that would like to go to market with some form of IT or telco service that they think complement their brand or that their brand can add value to. For example, we recently announced the launch of MVNO services with plan.com, which has a suite of services that they run on other people’s infrastructure. We are seeing pockets of growth in a variety of different areas, a lot of it around bandwidth, high bandwidth for cloud usage, or just the merging of IT and telco services. TR: In your experience what are some of the difficulties newer resellers might encounter in addressing the connectivity and telco demands of their customers? GJ: When you move into the telco world and you move into, for example, Teams, you’ve got to suddenly start looking at number ranges, you’ve got to start looking at porting, you’ve got to start looking at end user devices and stuff like that. And I think there’s an element of complexity to that. Is it harder than what they do in the IT world? No, but it’s a new skill for them to learn. This goes back to how we help people, how we do campaigns, how we train people, how we support people on this journey? People moving into new areas have got to learn new technology, new acronyms and new ways of doing things. You could work with an IT distributor that wants to sell telco services – and they can add a lot of value because they are shipping equipment on which you can add services – but in essence the world they work in is more product-based where they might just ship something out. With a service you’ve TR: I think in this time of digital transformation that sort of approach is essential and certainly helpful for your customers who need that more strategic involvement from their suppliers in terms of facilitating digital workflows. GJ: APIs for broadband and for our voice services and working digitally are super important and super critical, and the amount of information that partners can transact between our systems and theirs and the speed at which they can transact and the accuracy of the information is just unparalleled compared to swivel chairs, spreadsheets and phone calls. What we are seeing – and this is part of the digital revolution – is customers wanting to transact far more seamlessly, as opposed to traditionally filling things in or sending off orders and stuff like that. If we can get rid of every single piece of paper and everything like an order form that would represent success for us in terms of digital evolution. If you look at Amazon, and I know it’s a well quoted example, in theory you can sign up, you can contract, execute and do everything on a single page. That’s part of our strategy and our ambition for the future. TR: You’ve been pursuing this approach for 18 months or more. What sort of feedback have you had so far? GJ: The feedback, particularly in relation to the APIs, has been absolutely fantastic. They sit inside and outside the Partner Channel – they’re with all our customers – and it’s really about making those as seamless as possible, not only for the provision or ordering journeys, but for the repair and other journeys that people have as well. The feedback from the partner programme is also really good. Probably about 400 or so partners have signed ...continued
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