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Here’s a highlight from our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar where we ask our best resellers what problems their customers faced from the pandemic, how they solved it, and what we can learn from it to be even more prepared for the future.

Video Transcript:

Andy:

What kind of impact, whether it was negative or positive, did COVID-19 present to your business and, if you had a negative hit, how did you overcome that? What would be the one or two things that, were present to you as a business owner? Because you’ve got other owners on here, many of whom experienced exactly what you did. So let’s start with Louie. Why don’t you give us a story there?

Louis: 

Yeah, I think like everybody, we had an increase in tickets, which we expected just because the way they’re going to use the system had to pivot quickly. But I looked at it as an opportunity and that opportunity was to really show the clients how flexible the system was and how fast we could implement change. To piggyback on what Dan Crabill said about his restaurants. We actually do very little in the restaurant business but our very big success story is we have a retail operation that has 12 locations in the fitness industry. And if any of you have seen the national headlines about certain fitness products, it was actually helped their business, because everybody’s at home wanting to exercise. So they got crushed with phone calls and emails and requests to their website.

Naturally, they reached out and asked, ‘What can we do here? How do we handle this? How can we better manage it?’ 

The first thing that was obvious was they just needed to turn their phones off to stop them from ringing. We were able to quickly pivot to an auto-attendant; record the message that they needed it to say, to direct them to their chat on their website, as they can’t handle phone calls right now. 

They really appreciated that. And then they had to do curbside delivery, ‘text us when you arrived’. The mobile app came in handy for that and still does. 

The volume of texts that these guys received was just off the charts. And the SkySwitch system handled it beautifully. 

All 12 locations, probably had a thousand texts a day, in and out at each location. So iit was a great success story. 

And we took that knowledge and reached out to other clients in similar situations. And we’ve heard back from all of them, just how thankful they were, that they were on this system, that they had the ability to make these changes quickly, because obviously other systems, especially an on-prem(ises) system, can’t do a lot of those things. 

The requests we’re getting now, from new clients are obviously seeing that they couldn’t pivot quickly enough. I think all of us are going to benefit from this. When you’re selling now, how those success stories like that of not just how good the system is in terms of performance, but its flexibility, and how fast you can turn features on and off and really customize it for the customer.

This is just a highlight of our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar. Get even more tips, insight, and guidance with the full webinar right here.

Here’s a highlight from our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar where we ask our best resellers what problems their customers faced from the pandemic, how they solved it, and what we can learn from it to be even more prepared for the future.

Video Transcript:

Andy:

What’s the one thing, or two things, that you learned now that you wish you knew this before all this started because it would’ve made your life a lot easier and your customer’s life easier.

Dan: 

I think it’s, from a support issue, they (customers) didn’t use the kiss method: Keep It Simple, Stupid. 

We had a ton of tickets come in and people are like, ‘my phone doesn’t work.’ And we’re like, ‘what do you mean your phone on work?’ 

At the end of the day, they were plugging (their phone) into the wrong slot on the back of the phone. They get their poly-com and they plug it into the computer slot to plug into the ethernet port the back of the phone. 

We must have had 30 or 40 tickets open. It was crazy. So we just came up with a quick document, sent it out to everybody, and all of a sudden those (tickets) started slowing down.

So that was one of the big things, from the support side that we learned. We probably should have made that a little bit more clear with people taking these phones home.

So that was kind of one of the big things that we learned. And then, from a sales perspective, where we’ve had some pretty good success right now is talking to a lot of restaurants, that they were hurting because they didn’t know how to go mobile. 

Using all the texting features that SkySwitch has, we’ve actually walked into quite a few deals just by having the SMS feature and kind of educating our clients on how the mobility works from the VoIP side. I wish we, we thought of that at the beginning of all this, I think we could have picked up some more clients, but, those are my two takeaways.

Andy:

I want to dig a little deeper. And Corey did a great video on our appointment reminder app with restaurants because I know they make up a good chunk of our resellers’ businesses around the country. What exactly are you seeing the restaurants doing and how is it helping them, which in turn, if you’re helping your customer, it’s helping your business?

Dan: 

You know, a lot of them (didn’t know) that you can text their menu to this (customer’s) number and it sends the customer their menu. 

That was a big thing that a lot of my restaurants were doing. They were also using it as a way to place orders, just click here and it automatically dials into their SkySwitch phone (number). 

Those are two big things customers really liked because a lot of their customers were asking, ‘Hey, what’s your menu again?” And they (the restaurant) would go ‘great’, and just texted the menu to them. They’re like, ‘that was awesome,’ but then they (the customer) just hit ‘dial’, and boom, it would connect them to the restaurant. So, that was the two big things that the restaurants really took advantage of now.

This is just a highlight of our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar. Get even more tips, insight, and guidance with the full webinar right here.

Here’s a highlight from our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar where we ask our best resellers what problems their customers faced from the pandemic, how they solved it, and what we can learn from it to be even more prepared for the future.

Video Transcript:

Andy:

What was the one thing you learned that if you knew then what you know now, you would be doing differently?

Louis:

I definitely agree with Dan. We ran into that same thing. But one of the things we learned is our clients were much more open to having multiple devices full time.

One of the nice things with SkySwitch, we can have five devices per extension without additional seat charges. 

And once I started engaging customers who are now going to be living in this new reality, almost a hundred percent of them said, “so we just have to, you know, just for the one-time cost of the phone, we could leave the phone at home?” 

We had clients taking phones back and forth. They weren’t working full-time at home. They might’ve been working at home two, three days a week and they just got tired of dragging their phone around. 

Once we made all of our customers aware of that, they really appreciated that. So now we’re starting to sell a bunch more phones the last few weeks; just getting customers set up. So now they can have devices wherever they need to work full time. So I think that made us look really good when we were able to tell them we could do that very easily.

Andy:

So what you, what you’re saying is a lot of your customers created a new brand of mobile phone with Yealink or Polly or Grandstream, or any other brands that they have on their desk that became a mobile phone because they were having to take it to and from when really there was an easier solution. 

During the period of time where they were waiting to get second phones or third phones to work from at home, did you find any of them picking up the use of ReachUC, the soft client, and coming to you for help with configuration? Or what was it like around ReachUC?

Louis:

Yeah, absolutely. I guess it depends on the type of client, not all of our clients were even aware that a mobile app existed; that there are some situations where we sell to certain businesses that it’s, it’s just not necessary. 

So a lot of people didn’t even know about it. So we started getting the support tickets of just, “how do we work from home”? 

And then that’s when we introduced the mobile app to a lot of clients, the existing clients who knew about it, we didn’t hear from them because they just started using the app full time, rather than as an ancillary phone. 

I’m sure everybody else can speak to this, that the challenge with the mobile app is, of course, their internet, at home, as everybody’s experiences during the pandemic have just overworked or not enough bandwidth or not enough GOs at home.

We still struggle with that. We had to put out a blanket email to the office managers, basically, every one of our clients to let everyone know that this is a best-effort product. It’s going to depend on these variables. It’s not going to be the same experience you have with the desk phone. 

Once we kind of set the table with those parameters, things kind of calmed down and people understood, and as I’m sure other people experienced, turning off Wifi was a big hit for us.

That at least the cellular network tended to be a little better than a lot of people’s home broadband just where they were so that the mobile app really saved us.

And in the sense of, I think we may have lost clients, had we not been able to have that and to Skyswitch’s benefit. I know there were some capacity issues when things ramped up, but Skyswitch stepped up. I don’t know what you guys did in terms of the technical backend in terms of spinning up more resources. But that was brilliant. That SkySwitch was able to do that very quickly.

This is just a highlight of our Resellers Helping Resellers webinar. Get even more tips, insight, and guidance with the full webinar right here.

Channel Partners is one of the largest channel events for agents, MSPs, VARs, consultants, integrators and service providers. And this year, you can expect to find SkySwitch there.

Taking place from April 9th to April 12th at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, this conference provides a space for attendees to network with over 6,200 channel pros, learn from the best in business and explore the hottest innovations.

SkySwitch will be exhibiting for 3 days at the Expo Hall, where you can meet with some of our team and learn more about our leading-edge solutions in the UCaaS industry. We are excited to learn more about you and would be happy to talk about how our solutions may be advantageous for your business. (Like our rich Business SMS services complete with an intelligent keyword responder to our top-tier huddle rooms that showcase the best in telepresence technology.)

If you’d like to schedule a personal one-on-one meeting while you’re at Channel Partners, Jayson Jones, VP of Sales and Business Development, and Sean Breeden, Northeast Regional Sales Manager, will both be available. If you’d like dedicated time with one of our staff, make sure to request a meeting time as soon as possible.