By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email
Well this afternoon Qwest had their first conference call with all their telecom agent business channel partners and pretty much said what was expected, "It's too early to know for sure exactly what's going to happen about anything."
I spoke to a couple more TA members that are Qwest master agents and one theme is being repeated quite a bit, "CenturyTel really wanted the Qwest business sales machine and they're putting Chris Ancell in charge of anything that has to do with business sales for the merged company." Chris is mentioned quite positively in this Phone Plus article by Kelly Teal.
I don't know Chris personally but it sounds like he must be pretty well respected and smart to boot to have so many master agents suggest that there will be not agent blood running in the streets so long as Chris is in charge.
That's not to say though that there won't be unpleasantness down the road. During the conference call today one agent tried to press the Qwest executives on the call as to whether they would endorse the idea of residual commissions being paid to agents moving forward as opposed to switching back to single up-front commissions like what is received from the AT&T and Verizon agent programs.
The Qwest execs on the conference seemed to go out of the way to state they had no way of assuring the agents on the line that they could make it go one way or another.
When I asked a master agent I know this afternoon if he thought residual commissions would revert to up-front he said "no" but added that renewals might not be as lucrative. Most the experienced agents I'm talking too are more pragmatic than concerned.
What's the Bottom Line? Everyone gets what they can control.
Selling CLEC services in a semi-monopoly environment is never pretty for an agent. In many instances it's not like there's a lot of options for the customer as to which provider they're going to get service from. AT&T and Verizon know that - which is likely why they don't pay "evergreen commissions" to agents. They probably think, "Why pay an agent forever for bringing us a customer that we would have gotten anyway?"
Fortunately in the enterprise business space, the "national CLECs" are becoming the agent's best backup plan. With enough QoS enabled bandwidth, the up and coming unified communications providers like Smoothstone, Telesphere and other similar companies can get more and more of the "old business" from the "big 3" phone companies by paying the agents a handsome residual.
The other trump card for telecom agents and channel partners? TEM or "telecom expense management". By working through a TEM solution provider to make a large multilocation customer's telecom management experience more peaceful, many telecom agents are working with TA vendors that have robust, carrier-agnostic TEM packages that charge a customer a reasonable management fee for managing whatever carrier is best for the customer in any part of the company. Multilocation solution providers like TeleSource, Entelegent, Granite, BullsEye, NewEdge and others allow agents to keep earning money for making their customers happy no matter who the customer is doing business with.
The TA agent members I'm talking to know that Qwest (and likely CenturyTel) know all this. While agents can be treated poorly in some instances in the short run, agents in the future will have greater choices for the customer not fewer choices. Most everyone I've talked to expect Chris Ancell to split the difference in making the owners of the merged company happy without killing the golden goose of channel revenue now or in the future.
What Do You Think?
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