Call Queues, looking for competitve solution

[FASTDEVICE]

Fonality is now including unlimited basic Queues w/ their service at $24.99 per user/ per month and as a special offer Advanced call queues for the same $24.99 per user/ per month. 2600hz buy-in cost to enable queues is rather expensive and that doesn't include per-queue pricing.  I don't want to lose another account over not having queues, any thoughts on a way to stay competitive?

[Darren Schreiber]

What is the full deal all-in? A lot of times these published prices do not include all the details. Do you have to buy phones from them? Contract length minimum? What do they pay their resellers? What features are included in basic and advanced? etc. etc.

We get this comparison garbage all the time with RingCentral - people telling us RingCentral is $19.99/seat when it's just not true once you do all the math.

So, what's the full math? Where is this advertisement?

[FASTDEVICE]

Promotional Pricing: Advanced Call Queues
https://www.fonality.com/offers/ultimate-savings

Terms and Conditions: Offer valid for new install Fonality customers who sign up on or before February 28, 2017. Subscription-based Public Cloud or Private Cloud services only with minimum one-year agreement. Not valid for one-time purchase agreements or Hybrid-Hosted® solution. Minimum subscription of 5 seats. Offer valid for Fonality Ultimate Edition only. Customer is responsible for taxes, regulatory fees, and shipping costs. Fonality's standard Terms of Service and License Agreement apply. Changes and additions after the promotional period will be at regular price. No other discounts may apply, but additional restrictions may. Ask your sales representative for details.

Normal Pricing and Features: Unlimited Basic Call Queues
https://www.fonality.com/pricing

[Rick Guyton]

Feel your pain man. We are able to pass on the costs of the queues and agents to our client that really needs them. But we are eating that big monthly number and it sucks. I understand 2600hz needs to recoups something of their initial investment but dang....

[Darren Schreiber]

@FastDevice: I'm going to give them a call and find out more, but I bet $$$ that there's extra fees. Presumably you're also comparing this to our pricing with call recording, faxing, support, yes?

Did you look at their pricing in full?

According to it, if you sign up for $24.99/seat x 5 seats with Fonality and include faxing, call recording and support for each user, it's $56.99/mo.

So this is just not an apples to apples comparison in any way unless you're OK with me also removing call recording, faxing and support from your account? I doubt it.

@Rick & @FastDevice On a higher level, we don't really want to be building and supporting large $1,000,000 applications and then have resellers sell 2 of them to 10 people. That's not going to work. If the numbers have too high of sticker shock I'm open to other things, like raising the per-device fee in general and lowering the base fee on the apps. Other ideas welcome. But giving it to ONE client and then trying to make a living off of it is a bit outrageous of an expectation. That's like me expecting Microsoft to fund my retirement for selling one copy of Microsoft Exchange.

By my math, if you sell queues to anyone who has a support and sales team (two queues) with 10 seats where 6 people are signed up, and you have ten such customers, you have 100 seats with 60 of them being agents. At $12.99/user plus $3/agent plus the queue costs and base fee, that's:

$1,299/mo user + $180/mo agents + $800/mo queues + $499/mo base = $2,778 / 100 seats = $27.78/seat.

At first glance that's higher than Fonality based on this thread, BUT, they are charging for support, faxing, etc.

You can't market this for $39.99/seat which includes queues, call recording, and faxing and stay competitive? It's basically the same thing they're offering (cheaper potentially based on my high math above). You still make $12.21/seat x 100 seats = $1,221/month.

If you expand to 200 seats on the same math:

$2,598/mo user + $360/mo agents + $1600/mo queues + $499/mo base = $5,057 / 200 seats = $25.29/seat.


Perhaps we lower the per agent fee or queue fee. I could look at that. But I don't think the numbers are as far off as you guys are implying.

[Darren Schreiber]

Also if you switch to a per-device fee and pay for the minutes yourself, these numbers are probably much lower. That's another option.

[FASTDEVICE]

@Rick, I'm not going after call centers, but some of our clients enjoy the idea of a queue instead of direct to voicemail. Perhaps you can work out a wholesale rate and allow us to be resellers on your account for those clients? It would probably mean onboarding new clients only, but at least it's an affordable option for many of us smaller operators.   

[Darren Schreiber]

Is the main issue just the base fee? Seems like that is the benefit you would gain here.

[FASTDEVICE]

Yes. The enable fee is a barrier to entry for some of us. I was hoping you were offering two tiers of call queues; basic and advanced. The thought was basic would be part of your standard hosted offering. 

[Darren Schreiber]

I don't have time ATM to look at Fonality as an example but if I had to split up basic and advanced, I'd say:

Basic:
- Queues
- Hold Music
- No Reports
- Web Dashboard
- Web & Phone Login/Logout

Advanced:
- Reports
- Eavesdrop/whisper/barge
- Phone BLF for agent status, login, logout
- 0-out during queue
- Announce place in queue
- <other ideas>

thoughts?

Then maybe Basic is $99 or $199 to enable and a lower per-queue fee or something?

[Darren Schreiber]

Also could you please get a real quote from Fonality? Because your initial post is misleading. That is not an all-inclusive fee.

[Darren Schreiber]

Please note that we are trying really hard to communicate more with monthly newsletters and asking for feedback.

Rather then dismissing our new pricing and apps outright, please give feedback instead. "This price is too high, I was expecting XYZ..." Things of that nature. Assuming you're reasonable, we'll work to take them into account, but we need the feedback. Hopefully you do that before just running somewhere else.

[FASTDEVICE]

A potential Allstate client has the quote. Fonality wants their business in the worst way as they are now throwing in Polycom VVW 201 phones for free. The only reason I'm still in the race is my reputation for quality voice service thanks to 2600hz!  I'll see what I can do on getting them to give me the quote.   

[Darren Schreiber]

OK, thanks. We are working on releasing the other items at KazooCon too like operator console, call recording, etc. so that may help.

[Darren Schreiber]

Getting some good pricing suggestions via email. Like it so far, thanks guys :-)

So what if we did tiers instead? I have to make sure we can do this. Basically lower base fee but higher per-seat charge to start, then the seat charge goes down as you increase in volume?

[Tuly]

I like the lower base fee but higher per-seat charge to start,

( When You Say barge and whisper are included in call center features, how is it possible to price barge and Whisper per device? The same question goes for reporting, I understand a charge per queue)

[Rick Guyton]

@Darren: Your example is really confusing. You are throwing call recording (that we can't offer yet) and faxing (still limited) into the mix there. What's your thought on the value by itself of a single call queue license for an agent/device? To me, it's about $5/month. And that's my gripe. So, if we are doing only small accounts with these queues like you've asked, say an average of 5 phones, at $3/user + $10/queue I'm getting NO markup there. Then I have to pay $500 and I've got a new feature to support on my side. It really doesn't matter how much volume you throw at these numbers, I'm still loosing out on the feature.


@Jeff: LOL, I think you think I'm a lot bigger than I am man. :)

[Darren Schreiber]

@Rick, sorry it's confusing. Maybe we make it simpler.

Our system has the ability to do tiers. What we DON'T want is resellers who sign up ONE QUEUE ONLY and yet still demand features, support, documentation, etc. It's just not worth it unless the price is either higher, the feature set is smaller, or we can guarantee we won't lose money handling all their requests (labor is our biggest cost, like yours I imagine).

Based on feedback from FastDevice the big sticker shock seems to be around the $499/base. So I am going to work internally to see if we can lower that significantly and then instead charge a higher fee per agent.

That said, your perception of it being only worth $5/agent seems out of touch. Most vendors we know get at least $10/month additional out of the combination of call recording (which, yes, you can already do) and call queues alone. And they charge that on ALL seats just to have the feature turned on for a single account. So a 10 person office pays $34.99/seat for example for access to 5 agents and 1 queue, BUT in our case the reseller is paying $12.99 + $3 ONLY on the users who are configured as an agent, which isn't all 10 people. Thus, you can sell a deal for $349.90/month but if there's only 5 actual agents, and one queue, it's costing you ($12.99 x 10) + ($3 x 5) + ($20 x 1) = $164.90 . So on a $349.90/month deal you're making $185. Three of those and you've easily made back the base fee.

Nonetheless, I'll see if we can't do a ramp strategy so the base fee is less up-front significantly but the per-agent is higher, and then you get the benefit if you add seats of a lower price with more agents.

[Rick Guyton]

See, you threw another feature in there to justify the cost. Call recording. I do see a $10 markup with hosted providers. But, to my mind the markup seemed to mostly due to the fast that those users are going to be on their phones more, using more minutes. $10 markup for a queue breaking down to $5/month/queue license + $3-4/month/to cover increased carrier costs + $1-2/month to cover recording. Maybe it's just me though...

[Darren Schreiber]

OK, so we should lower the call queue price and start charging for call recording then. Good info to know.

Let me take this back to the team and I'll see what we can do here.

[Rick Guyton]

LOL, charging for storage to be more specific. We will be paying AWS for that if I'm not mistaken.

EDIT: unless 2600hz is going to be doing the storage for us. In that case, by all means you should charge for recording storage.

[Darren Schreiber]

OK, stay tuned, let me see what we can do!

[Rick Guyton]

Cool, thanks Darren. Not speaking for everyone else for sure. But I'd be really happy to see a $3/agent/month with a$500/month min. That'd still leave some meat on the bone for per profit on a per agent level and I think would cover you all pretty well on your concerns.

[Darren Schreiber]

You'd prefer a minimum over a base fee? That surprises me. OK, let's see what we can do!

[Rick Guyton]

Well, yea. In the base fee senario, I'm still paying the $500 a month, but it's not really getting me anything. It's just turning the app on. In the minimum scenario, my costs are at least going to pay for the queues. So, at 30 agents, I'm still paying $500/month. As opposed to $590 for base fee + per agent costs.

Even if you had a solution with a lower base rate with the agent cost + queue cost, I'd still rather pay a minumum on a straight up per agent cost. Then I know that I have a clear pathway to be profitable on it. The per agent+per queue+the flat rate thing... the only pathway I see to profit is to code out a replacement using pivot and real time call control eventually.