technologyreseller.co.uk 29 also about how you then harness data to really understand your customer’s profile. The MSPs and resellers that are most successful in the UK market right now are those that can build a proper value proposition for their end customers.” To find out more about Access4, please visit https://uk.access4.com/ AI assistance & insights Another benefit of partnering with Access4, particularly for MSPs new to voice, is that it frees them from the burden and uncertainty of trying to find best-of-breed solutions and technologies at a time of rapid change. With its multi-vendor approach, curated platform, scale and engineering expertise, Access4 does all that hard work on the partner’s behalf. A case in point, says Walker, is AI, which Access4 has been developing from both a product perspective, e.g. automated agentic IVR strands, and a platform perspective through AI guidance and insights. “What SASBOSS allows you to do is to capture that big data and be able to understand what your customers are buying. And not only your customers. We can also give insights into what customers in certain demographics are buying, so we can help you understand what else you should be selling to your customers that other people are already selling to them. AI is about things such as IVRs and automated systems, but it’s to communicate via different channels, whether that be WhatsApp, messaging, SMS. They also want to be able to transcribe and to understand sentiment on calls and to make more use of AI. All those services can be bought and consumed via SASBOSS and managed in one place,” added Walker. “To give a use case example, you could have a contact centre enabled with WhatsApp and Messenger and an AI agent for web chat. All that information can be captured and recorded, sentiment‑analysed and integrated and managed through the CRM system. This allows the reseller to sell a complete solution to that end customer, taking that proposition away from a standardised UC seat, which we know is a commoditised item.” The ability to create bundles comprising Access4 solutions and those from third parties (Access4 already has integrations with more than 100 leading business applications and CRMs) is also useful for creating propositions optimised for different verticals. UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS A decade of evolution Tim Jackson outlines the evolution of SASBOSS over the last 10 years In 2012 Access4 founder Tim Jackson was running a carrier service provider (CSP) providing voice and data services to buildings developed by the CSP’s parent company. He needed to move 7,000 seats to a cloud platform but couldn’t find one that met his needs so started building his own. By 2015 he had developed an enormous Broadsoft-based platform with just 7,000 ends on it and no ambition from the property developer to fill it up through anything but organic growth. Jackson did a management buy-out of the platform and started developing it further to meet the needs of resellers and MSPs in Australia and New Zealand. “If you went to market in 2013 you were basically handed a portal and told to build it, find your own billing, create your own collateral. We asked ourselves what were the major problems that IT providers and communication service providers would face going to a cloud platform and built SASBOSS accordingly.” Key decisions were to build it with scale and automation in mind and to support different commercial models, so that a CSP, for example, could buy cloud voice off a distributor to resell itself and through agents or sub-resellers on a commission basis. “The other thing we addressed was how to get customers in there doing self-service. Even 10 years ago, we knew that MSPs wanted to make more profit. Do they put more cash people on‑desk to do all the tickets or do we give them a white label login so that the receptionist at a customer can get a phone out of the cupboard, drop down the menu, pull the MAC address, provision a phone and put it on the desk for someone starting on Monday. That was the vision we had for the customer portal. And today, people can still do that if the partner lets them in.” Next, Access 4 added an overhead reduction layer. “We knew that if someone came to Access4 they could make 30 points margin straight away without any real investment, because we did all the investment and all the engineering. But people were still saying, I’m spending three days a month doing billing because I’m having to pull all the CDRs together. So we dealt with that. In 2015, we still had people waking up on a Monday with a $150,000 bill because their PBX got hacked on Saturday and was used to call Africa for 32 hours. So we added some active shutdown methods. One of the suppliers we signed up in 2016 had two full time people sitting on a bench unboxing phones, provisioning them with a password and putting them back into a box and shipping them off. It was costing them $150,000 in salaries just for handset provisioning. So we started zero touch provisioning. We’ve put a porting state machine into the platform and basically do everything for the partner – they submit the port and it’s all taken care of, automated and API-driven. There’s ticket support, system alerting, customer self service. It’s a full marketplace.” He adds that partners don’t pay for SASBOSS. These are just the benefits of using Access4’s ecosystem. “The next development, which we introduced a couple years ago, was an enablement layer. So, we’ve now got a full Academy learning and training team. We build content, we deliver content, we do webinars, we have a knowledge base and just in time learning. “Now, we’re looking at analytics and insights into 10 years and millions and millions of rows of databases. With our AI overlay we can show partners how they can reduce sales cycles or if there’s an attrition event coming because customer behaviours have changed.” He adds that AI can also help MSPs that typically might work with 20 or more vendors to get more out of Access4’s product catalogue. “If a partner goes in and looks at selling to a medical vertical, we can use anonymised information in the back end of our system to get that product right and the add-ons to try and make it a more successful sale and a quicker sale.”
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