Twinning and more – managing mobile numbers for SoHo users
How can you deliver a simple but valuable service to business users who don’t look like businesses? Help them manage calls across different devices and identities.
You probably have lots of small business users hidden in your consumer customer base
To many MNOs, a business doesn’t count as an entity unless there are 10 or more users. At the same time, companies with fewer than 10 employees constitute by far the largest number of companies in most countries – a fact that is well-known, but which continues to be overlooked.
You probably have lots of sole traders in your consumer customer base, using your packages and bundles – but you may not be giving them something they need to run their businesses more effectively.
But even a sole trader has requirements that can’t always be met with a standard airtime package. For example, what if they want to use a virtual number for their business? What if they want to control when calls to that number can reach them? Or control which number is presented to people when they make outbound calls?
Help them manage identities and calls – with a simple service
Enabling this is a simple process, which we manage through a combination of our twinning and business/private line functionality. Twinning means that a user may have two SIM cards (or eSIMs), but which are activated on different mobile handsets. When the virtual or business number is called, both will ring, so the user can choose on which to answer the call.
With the addition of the business / private line logic, private calls can be handled as normal, but the business user can set times during which they want calls to be delivered to their devices, and times when they want them to be diverted to voicemail. They can also get the business calls terminated on a device with their private SIM, but when they may outbound calls, set the presentation number to match their business identity. And so on – there’s lots that can be done.
The point is that this ability to handle calls and settings for a single user adds value to their business and makes it a bit easier to handle important calls to and from customers, suppliers and so on.
Cost-effective for them, profitable for you
What’s really interesting is that such services can rapidly gain traction. We have customers for which this represents almost 30% of the B2B base – but this is a segment that wouldn’t normally be reached at all by other operators.
And, it’s a service that can generate €2 – 3 per month per user – essentially, a high-margin offer that grows revenue for operators from a segment many overlook, while delivering clear value for the users.
Of course, when their businesses grow, you can add more services, turning new colleagues into members of a call team, but that’s another story. So, if you are trying to find seams within your customer base and to discover new revenue, remember that it’s not always a complex service that matters – something as simple as twinning with control over business and private numbers is easy to deploy, simple to manage – and builds lasting revenue.
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