According to this announcement, BT is featuring highly flexible pricing arrangements for its Next Generaion Contact Centre as an enticement to new customers. It even follows the classic “freemium” model by offering “three months and 50 agents free of charge for all customers signing a contract for NGCC before 31 March 2010” (subject to certain conditions).

BT’s NGCC services are supported by data centers on three continents. Its OneVoice offering was launched in December 2009 in conjunction with Cisco as part of its global, cloud-based IP telephony portfolio. Now, two months on, BT’s applying some of the new age marketing methodologies to try to accelerate global acceptance. The granularity of the offers is impressive. Enterprise customers can choose among “per concurrent agent”, “per logged-in agent” or choose to pay per usage, based on “per effective hour or even per effective minute”, starting as low as 4 pence per minute.

Incumbent carriers, like BT and its western European peers like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Telefonica are playing the important role of catalyst for enterprise customers that are making the transition to IP-Telephony. AT&T, Verizon Business and QWEST are in a similar position in North America. Thus far BT, with such a granular offer is the most aggressive in creating a package that lowers entry barriers posed by high prices and complexity.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cisco, IP telephony, Cloud-based telephony, hosted services, British Telecom