Our partner VoIP.ms discusses the benefits of adding VoIP to your service offerings and the most important considerations for choosing a SIP partner in a featured guest blog post, part of Rev.io’s Strategic Partner Program blog series.
Here comes the end of another quarter. The pandemic has hit all of us in many different ways, and as a Managed Service Provider, you are wondering what you could add to your portfolio of services that could generate more revenue and less seasonality.
In this blog, we address a commonly asked question: should you add VoIP to your service offering?
Why Adding VoIP to Your Service Offering Can Boost Your Business
As the pandemic hit in early 2020, the majority of service workers started working from home. During this period, a boatload of new collaboration software appeared on the market. According to many surveys, people expect to have a fair balance between their home and the office once life returns to the new normal. Companies like Slack announced the option to work from home permanently and Google expects that 60% of its employees will be on-site for a few days a week, with 20% working in new office locations and 20% working from home. Collaboration tools are here to stay. Microsoft Teams grew from 115M daily active users in October 2020 to over 145M in April 2021!
While there is a lot of collaboration software appearing on the market, there is also an emerging trend where vendors open their doors to any provider for handling SIP. Here comes your best opportunity as a managed service provider to start selling Session Initiation Protocol, or “SIP.” SIP not only allows you to generate great margins, but also opens you up to a lot of upsell opportunities with your current customers. In one way or another, there is a great chance that the great majority of your customers use VoIP.
Important Things to Consider When Choosing Your SIP Partner
When it comes to choosing a SIP partner, there are various things to consider. The first action to take is a strategic assessment of how much time you and your team can dedicate to this project and how fast you want it to happen… next month, next quarter, or next year?
An important point to also consider is whether you want to build everything from scratch or not.
Consider the following:
- Do you have a sizable team of developers ready to jump on the project?
- Does your SIP Partner offer a REST API?
- Does your SIP Partner offer a white label solution to resell the service?
Each of these options is more or less time consuming. While the API will give you more flexibility, the white label solution will be much faster to deploy.
You have been building your reputation for many years, everybody knows about your brand name. You need a partner that can support you through growth… and through a crisis (because it does happen!).
Consider the following:
- Does your SIP Partner provide 24/7 support?
- Can you get a new SIP trunk turned up in a matter of a few minutes?
- How much engagement is involved with the launch of this new service?
- Is your SIP partner asking you to sign a minimum monthly commitment for the next three years?
- Is your SIP partner supporting any specific brands, thus allowing you to upsell your current customers at a much faster pace?
- Do you have to hold inventory of numbers on hand, or can you offer it through a simple API integration, thus making greater margins?
Another interesting thing to consider is what else is your SIP partner offering. Now that may add SIP to your portfolio of services, consider the following:
- Does your partner offer other SIP-related products?
- Do you have retail clients? (If so, messaging is booming all across the world. You should definitely check out whether your partner supports SMS and MMS.)
- Do you have healthcare clients?
- Can your partner support faxing?
Work With Partners That Matters
One of the remaining things to consider when deciding whether you should add SIP to your service offering or not is whether your partner is geared to support you when it comes to billing your customers. VoIP.ms has developed a thorough relationship with Rev.io so that every managed service provider wishing to add SIP to their service offering is well taken care of.
We are sure that reading this article will enlighten you on new growth opportunities. To speak with your next SIP partner and discuss whether or not adding VoIP to your service offering is right for you, contact the VoIP.ms team. You will find excellent advisors who will put your business growth at the top of their priority list.