We plan to reach 5 lakh SMEs in 250 cities”

Deepak Pande, executive vice president and head, SME Business, Vodafone Business Services, Vodafone India talks about their SMB focus and plans to enhance SMB reach

What are your offerings in the Indian SMB Space?

Vodafone Business Services (VBS) is a total communications provider that caters to Voice & Data, Wireless and Fixed-Line requirements of enterprise customers. With the advantage of global experience and knowledge of local markets, the VBS offering is fast growing in India. For SME, VBS offers solutions in mobile, wireline services, machine-machine solutions, toll-free services, conferencing and collaboration, application mobility and connectivity solutions. We also offer managed services for the SME clients along with video conferencing and web conferencing. Another set of important offering is the automated, operator assisted audio conferencing services.

Please mention the top selling products manufactured to address SMB space in India?

We have been providing end-to-end telecom management solutions for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in view of their changing business needs. These include mobility and “always on” data. SMEs are more “mobile” than any other segment. They feel comfortable with smartphones and so on. Also with remote asset management, they can have a centralized program for controlling what data employees can download on their mobiles when in office or how they use their tablets and mobile phones. Overall, we leverage our core competencies on mobile voice, fixed line data and provide SMEs with improved productivity and lowered costs.

Please mention a few key clients in this space who endorse your products?

We have had a very successful response from our strategic technology partnership with Mahindra Reva e2o. As part of the innovation, e2o owners can use their smart phones or any internet connected computer with Vodafone’s connectivity, monitor the level of charge in the battery of their car and how far they can travel with the available charge. They can also remotely control the vehicle’s air-conditioning and set schedules to pre-heat or pre-cool the car before they use it. The owner can also receive alerts on various events with the car such as a disruption in charging due to power cuts, safety related reminders such as a door being left unlocked or a parking brake not applied. In an emergency he can boost charge with a command on the smart phone to go an extra 8-10 kms.

Do you think you have addressed the challenges that they were facing in the yesteryears?

One of the biggest challenges for SMBs today is to be future-fit-more agile to market developments and responsive towards both employees and customers. All of this requires sound knowledge of IT solutions and skilled labour, both of which is not available at an affordable cost. At Vodafone, we use mobility and fixed-line products and services to create solutions for our customers’ business needs and make them more prepared to face the future.

Ready Business is Vodafone’s solutions-led approach towards the entire spectrum of size of businesses, including SMEs. We work with our customers to understand their businesses better and create our telecommunications-led solutions to address their challenges. This allows companies to be more responsive to future challenges – from increasing demands of customers to more connected employees. We have also evangelized a Business Readiness Scorecard. Readiness Score that signifies the state of ‘readiness’ of their business. To this they get suggestions on the Vodafone solutions they can deploy to make their businesses more ‘ready’.

What kind of pricing strategy do you follow while catering to SMB clients? Since defining SMB in India is a dubious challenge, how do you cater to each of their budget constrains? Do you tweak your product to cater to their needs? If yes, please share a case study?

At Vodafone, we understand that every client is unique and the needs of clients are different. Keeping this in mind, we have a host of services that can be customized as per the needs of our clients. For instance, with remote asset management, clients can have centralised program for controlling what data employees can download on their mobiles when in office or how they use their tablets and mobile phones. For SMEs we provide internet, mobile (fixed line network), application mobility, virtual private network (VPN) i.e office-to-office data transfer solutions. We also bundle these offerings to make it more cost effective for SMEs. Our offerings like mobile secure device manager (MSDM) was capable of helping the office administrators (simply admin) effectively manage the data flow and information security.

What kind of distribution strategy do you follow to cater to SMB clients?

We propose to enhance our reach from 2,50,000 SME s in 165 towns to 5,00,000 SMEs in 250 towns. Distribution channels are key elements to expand the market reach, grow revenue and serve the growing SME India segment. Key differentiator is that together, we are able to offer our SME customers a wide array of solutions and services. Besides the traditional channel partner model, new progress initiatives in this area would be;

 An Indirect partner ecosystem that collaborates with our channel partners and leverage the market potential

 Inside sales team driving high margin complex sales. It is new sales channel that can increase reach by enabling segmentation based on industry and complexity

 Virtual support teams supporting solutions across all geographies and handling around 3000 opportunities in last one fiscal

Which regions of India, according to you have strong SMB foothold and have you addressed them with your product? If yes, why. If No why?

Potential regions in India would be Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Mumbai. Yes, we have addressed them with our suite of portfolio offerings including mobility voice, fixed line data, managed services and further penetrating with our vertical specific solutions.