"You treat this place like a hotel!"

How many times have you said that to your children in the past, or how many times did you hear that from a parent? You probably never realised that soon you could be saying this to your licensees...

There, right from under your feet, the rug is being pulled for a lot of UK business centres, and they’re either not noticing or they’re powerless to do anything about it. However, Centrix can help, so let us explain more...

When was the last time you stayed in a hotel and used the telephone in the room?

I should imagine sometime in the 1990s, before you owned a mobile. It’s a well known fact that people only ever use a hotel phone if they have no mobile coverage, or a flat battery.

Why is this? Well, guests voted with their fingers, at the extortionate unit costs of telephone calls and the feeling of being “ripped off”. So what did hotels do to offset the declining revenues? They put up the price.

Business Centres should remember one of the single biggest reasons companies adopt their services (apart from the flexible licence arrangement) and that is access to technology they couldn’t easily afford elsewhere, and the buying power of a number of companies. Our experience shows that, for the majority of British business centres, you’re delivering basic telephony (ISDN, DDI and voicemail) and still hoping to get away with BT standard call charges. Hardly encouraging use of your telephony, is it?

So, what can be done to reverse the trend before you end up saying “You treat this place like a hotel!”?

Let’s begin by reminding ourselves just what you have to offer. You should be buying minutes from a company like Centrix at less than 1p per minute. Did you know that the current BT standard call charge for a national call is approximately 10p per minute?! I thought not. You use your economies of scale in buying in bulk and you should pass that on as a tangible benefit to your licensee, and shout from the rooftops about it. You could charge them 3p a minute and still be making a 200% mark-up. Not bad, surely?!

You can get cleverer still by offering free local and national calls (with a quota or a “fair use” policy to protect you). If you offered a customer 1,000 free local and national calls a month it would cost you less than £10 a month. A great attention-grabbing headline, surely? And you’d still make your margin on mobile and international calls.

However, will price alone be enough to encourage the use of your telephony service? Possibly not. Customers are now ahead of what 99% of business centres can offer and are demanding the features they have on their mobile; dial-by-name, visual voicemail, synchronisation with Outlook etc. Many years ago business centres were early-adopters of technology and actively encouraged the uptake of services such as ISDN, DDI and voicemail to small businesses. This is no longer the case and it would not be unfair to say that business centres are often behind the curve of adoption now.

So, what can you do about this?

Talk to Centrix about the new features that you should be offering your customers and how you can better market yourselves and the wider benefits of being in a business centre. And remember, it’s as much about protecting an existing revenue stream as it is about identifying new revenue opportunities!

If you’d like an informal chat about how we can benefit your Centre then please email me at richard.burbage@centrix-uk.com or call us on 01252 848888. If not, we’ll see you at the bca Annual Conference on the 17th and 18th May 2010.

Don’t stagnate, keep on inventing and keep on differentiating.

Richard Burbage,
Centrix Limited

> More information from Centrix