Wellington
Upcoming economic challenges mean it’s crunch time for Kiwi partners. Therefore, strengthening relationships with customers will be key to achieving certainty and sustainability in turbulent times.
For Wellington-based Circle Consulting & Software, its unrelenting focus on customer outcomes, and the specific offering of Amazon Connect, aim to shore up the business against growing economic headwinds.
Speaking to Reseller News, Circle Consulting & Software Director, Tony Lennon, shared insights into upcoming opportunities for the Contact Centre Systems Integrator and Support Provider as Cloud migration gains momentum in New Zealand.
Within the contact centre industry, Lennon is seeing an increased focus on workforce management, intelligent self-service solutions and workflow automation technologies.
For Circle Consulting, Amazon Connect represents a wraparound solution for customer requirements.
“Our key proposition here is Amazon Connect, which has moved from being seen as a disruptive market entrant to a bona fide Enterprise Grade Contact Centre proposition”, Lennon said. “This is driven by the pace of innovation and the sheer number of large, complex transitions that have been completed in the last 24 months”.
This maturing and scaling of Amazon Connect has given customers a greater degree of confidence in the offering. A more compelling commercial proposition lends itself to increased opportunity for partners such as Circle Consulting, Lennon explained.
“In this space, our key priority is to grow our installed base and annuity revenue streams for Amazon Connect cloud contact centre and associated third-party applications”, he said.
Therefore, Circle Consulting’s efforts are focused on accelerating marketing, partnering, and pipeline and sales efforts in Amazon Connect as their key cloud go-to-market solution.
Reflecting the state of the market, Lennon adds that the biggest challenge for focusing on this priority of growing revenue streams is the general economic and political environment.
Of particular concern for Circle Consulting are growing headwinds in the economy and the government’s response to this. Despite anticipating a regional growth of 15 per cent, customer spending may tighten.
According to Lennon, these economic concerns, including 30-year inflation highs, have the “potential to place severe constraints on NZ businesses, many of whom are desperately trying to rebuild their brands and shake off the impact of the pandemic and global supply chain issues”.
In this high-competition sector, retaining customers is paramount as this helps solidify the foundation of the business and therefore allows Circle Consulting to pay attractive talent packages.
Lennon is also focused on customer acquisition, with future plans to diversify away from reliance on traditional premises-based solutions.
“Growth of cloud solutions is rapid and we need to ensure we focus on growing this revenue stream”, Lennon said.
Despite these upcoming economic challenges, Lennon notes that the key attributes of a successful tech provider will remain the same as they always have: "Responsiveness, being able to demonstrate expertise and capability, and an unrelenting focus on the customer outcome”.
Keeping up with changing customer demands is never more important in cloud environments. Kiwi partners looking to upscale customer value need to harness expertise and world-class skills to articulate why customers need partners to assist with cloud migrations projects.
“We believe competencies like integration and inter-operability expertise will be key in our market segment”, Lennon added.
