Our Beginnings
Starting life as the development team for Vodafone, we saw the internal working of the largest network provider in the UK. Having built the internal order processing systems over a period of two years, the real benefits to the Vodafone partner communting was realised when the front end web portal, eContract, was released to the partner community.
Originally working as the dedicated B2B telecoms sector within Vodafone, the team was originally part of the Yes Telecom story that saw one of the partners bought by Vodafone as part of a 30 million pound aquisition deal.
Vodafone kept this division at arms length in order that they could reap the benefits of what Yes Telecom did well, looking after their business partners. This enabled us to continue with a program of technical solutions that would ultimately change the way partners did business with the major networks.
In the summer of 2010, everything changed. Vodafone decided they wanted to integrate the B2B dividsion born out of Yes telecom into their existing corporate structure. One of the results of this was that the program of technical change got suspended. All of the promises made to the partners weren't going to come to fruition.
Going it alone
Frustrated at the cancellation of the program of change, much of the technical team left. The partners themselves felt the pain too!
But some of them saw it as an opportunity. They wanted to replicate the model that the gap created by the acquisition of Yes Telecom had left in the B2B market, and part of that was to replicate some of the systems that Yes had developed for them.
One of the first to recognise this was one of the bigger Vodafone partners, Abzorb. They had already spent a lot of time and money on their back end systems in order to support their internal sales team and also their indirect sales partner program. But there was a piece missing! They wanted their own partner portal. Working closely alongside their existing team of developers, RQT built a basic framework so that their partners could reap the benefits of managing their customer bases very early in the process.
Over a period of more than 2 years, we continued to improve the portal so that it incorporated all of the finer points of eContract and also allowed us to keep moving with the original ideas that Yes Telecom wanted to pursue. It has also been developed even further in the movement towards unified comms through the integration of the fixed line platform with Genius Networks. You can read more about that here.
As more and more B2B service providers saw what was happening, they got on board and we have developed different solutions for different partners with varying markets. These have included:
- Zest4 partner portal, predominantly concentrating on mobile arena.
- Vapour Media partner portal for the cabling and fixed line markets.
Our Future
We are continuing to work with partners who want to increase their revenues with the introduction of a partner program. Our solution allows for a provider to manage both this indirect sales stream as well as their own internal sales.
The product has advanced through seeing how our partners business needs have changed in response to how the communiction market is continuously evolving. Havong just introduced a self-care module we are now working to extend the crm capabilites of the application. Furthermore, we are working at including more fixed product integration that we have done with our Vapour Media partner in response to the unified comms requirements of our clients.
If you are interested in extending your business's sales capabilities then please get in touch with us here.