At Vocus, we know how important high speed, reliable and secure connectivity is for our enterprise and government customers. We know because it's what we do and because we listen to our customers.

Our customers also tell us how important good account management is to their business. Not just having someone to proactively take care of the day-to-day things, but someone who can offer strategic support, help improve their business and add value over time.

We couldn't agree more. So at a time when some telcos are pulling back their account management for large customers, we're doing things differently and giving it more attention than ever.

After all, it's what customers want and it's well supported by industry research from Gartner that shows the value account management can bring to customers.

Helping customers improve their business

In its research, Gartner looked at what account managers do that delivers the most value to customers. At the top of the list, is helping customers improve their business.

Gartner found the most effective account managers help customers understand how they might improve their business in ways they had yet to fully appreciate on their own.

It found the most important aspects were offering unique and critical perspectives on a customer’s business, providing a vision for how to improve their business and demonstrating clear ROI.

Helping to make your job easier

Further Gartner research also highlighted the value of an account manager helping a customer through the decision making and buying process – something that has changed dramatically for enterprise customers. Gartner found the median B2B buying group today involves six to 10 decision makers‚ each armed with four or five pieces of information they have gathered for themselves.

It refers to this level of support as “buyer enablement” or as our account managers like to say, helping make life easier for our customers by understanding their business and providing relevant information and insights to support them.

For large business and government customers, fibre networks and services are not only mission critical but are often incredibly complex. This makes finding the right supplier with the right level of account management incredibly important, and often more important than getting the lowest price.

Our people are the difference

Which is why we’re doing things differently at Vocus. One of our company values is Our People Are the Difference, so we are investing in our local account managers and their ongoing development.

We’ve also established key industry account teams with deep expertise and experience in the financial services and mining and resources sectors. These teams compliment our existing federal, state and local government teams, who have a rich history of supporting critical domestic and international initiatives.

We’re not about trying to be all things to all people. We’re about doing the things that matter for customers and doing them well.

And of course, underpinning everything we do is our network – one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest fibre networks, connecting wholesale, enterprise and government customers in the region and to the world via our links to major global gateways. This is backed by the support of local provisioning and our 24/7 Australian-based network operations centres.

The key questions

So we think it’s time to ask yourself some questions. Is your telco cutting costs and pulling back from the account management they used to provide? What impact is this likely to have on you, your team and the improvement of your business?