Intelisys Channel Connect: Customer Experience The 'Next Frontier' For Partners

Intelisys, a ScanSource company, has helped its sales partners grow their business through new technologies and services for years. Now, the master agent wants to help agents and VARs go deeper with customers by focusing on customer experience.

Intelisys considers cloud-based unified communications to be one its hottest technologies, and specifically, the opportunity around the cloud-based contact center has recently taken off. Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is influencing more partners to think about end-user experience, Intelisys' president Jay Bradley told CRN ahead of the master agent' annual Channel Connect event, which is being held in Monterey, Calif. this week.

"The next frontier is the concept of customer experience, which is important in helping partners go deeper and get broader across each customer they have," Bradley said.

[Related: Intelisys And ScanSource: UcaaS Sales Are 'Off The Charts']

An emphasis on customer experience gives partners a new way to stay relevant with their customers, not to mention, "stickier," Bradley said.

"Partners that consider experience are focusing on building solutions that understand the issues that customers face, as opposed to just looking at selling cloud and connectivity," he said. "There's a huge opportunity there."

The good news is that the contact center market is largely untapped, meaning more for the partners getting into this space early, Intelisys said. According to a 2018 report from firm Research And Markets, the global cloud-based contact center market is expected to grow from $6.80 billion in 2017 to $20.93 billion by 2022.

Two years since Greenville, S.C.-based IT distributor ScanSource acquired Intelisys, the two companies are helping each other grow in new areas. ScanSource in August acquired Canpango, a consultant with a strong Salesforce practice, to help partners add additional value through consulting and implementation of Salesforce for their customers.

With the help of ScanSource, Intelisys is gaining new resources via acquisitions which is helping the master agent go deeper with partners, who can then use these services and technologies to provide a better experience to their own end customers, said Andrew Pryfogle, senior vice president of cloud transformation for Petaluma, Calif.-based Intelisys.

Partners who can harness technology to help their customers stay competitive or become more nimble will help that partner achieve relevance and differentiation that they've never been able to reach before, Pryfogle said.

"Our portfolio in the [customer service] space is helping us dominate in that market, and it's actually a topic that bridges the ScanSource and Intelisys partner communities better than anything else," he said.

Intelisys has close to 4,000 sales partners today, and about 1,000 of those partners are VARS, Pryfogle said. Following the acquisition, these partners really began investing in building out recurring revenue practices, he said.

As the company's partner base grows, it’s a priority for Intelisys to keep familiar faces in front of the partners that they've developed in their region, Bradley said. Intelisys took to Channel Connect to share the promotion of Justin Marano to vice president of sales for the company's Northeast region. Marano previously served as director of partner sales for the past four years.

"[Marano's] partners who have a relationship with him will get to maintain their relationship and grow their business with him," Bradley said.