3 Things we learned at Channel Live 2019

Channel Live is always one of the most anticipated events in the channel calendar, bringing likeminded businesses together in the second largest city in the UK, Birmingham. I’ve attended Channel Live for the last few years and I relish the chance to meet with Partners, create new connections and engage in thought provoking conversation.

After an eventful couple of days at Channel Live, the TalkTalk Business team and I have combined our key learnings and we’d love to share them with you.

In my panel debut, “Connectivity as a commodity: dealing with price pressures” I joined several providers, such as Virgin Media Business, Entanet, Sky Business Comms and Vaioni, to discuss how connectivity providers can demonstrate value to customers, instead of focusing on price.

Sometimes it can be challenging to demonstrate value to smaller businesses who often want to pay the same price as a consumer line but still receive an enterprise grade service wrap. Larger businesses tend to be savvier, however full resilience continues to be undervalued by some, but even a 5-hour SLA would feel like a very long time in a large business if their EAD experienced an outage.  Or for a smaller retail business who relies on card payments, if their connectivity goes down, they won’t be able to fully transact which could incur impactful losses. It’s only when you ask customers to consider the scale of loss if their connectivity fails that people begin to appreciate the value of add-ons such as resiliency.

I argued that one of the ways providers can evidence the value of their connectivity is by helping customers to understand the underpinning network. Many providers claim to have a nationwide, uncontended and resilient network, but often this isn’t the case. Every network is created differently, and some are more high-performing than others, so it is worth understanding what you are plugging into.

End-customers often don’t ask providers important questions such as, what are the resiliency options? What’s the network utilisation? Are they updating service index data? What’s the peering like? Do you have choice in terms of which exchanges the connections will go to? Proactively sharing the answers to these questions can help reveal the true quality of a network/solution and if customers take time to understand this, they can definitely help to expand the conversation outside of just pricing.