At Telecom Europe LIVE, Telness’s co-founder and CEO talks about success in the Nordics driving expansion plans including the US
Operators are constantly searching for new revenues streams and have struggled to serve the biggest business sector, SMEs. Sweden’s Telness has been successful by taking a different, highly scalable approach, gaining about 16,000 customers (perhaps 1% of the potential market) with almost no investment in marketing and one sales person.
It co-founder and CEO, Martina Klingsvall says her motto is, “If you think you are too small to make a difference…try sleeping with a mosquito in your bedroom”. Telness has been the highest rated service provider in Sweden since it launched in 2017. Asked how she knew how to make customers happy, she says, “It’s a big target” because SMEs’ needs are generally so badly served.
Learning from failing
Klingsvall an engineer who formerly worked at Telenor, including on many huge transformation projects designed to reduce opex and get products to market faster. As is usual in the industry, many failed, but she learned a great deal – especially around the importance of culture, innovation (architecture and languages), thinking differently (taking learnings from beyond the telecoms industry) and being customer-driven.
Telness found it had to build its own platform to operate the first MVNO in Sweden to serve SMEs because it couldn’t buy technology that scaled. The cloud-based, end-to-end BSS/OSS platform is available (see below for expansion plans) in 64 countries to help service providers, MVNOs and others.
Mobile apps support mobile, PBX and IoT.
Value, not just infrastructure
Klingsvall says she believes the winners will be those who don’t only focus on infrastructure, but on value for end users. She talks about the trend of operators launching digital brands to learn how to address certain user segments. The idea is to make the territory bigger, rather than fight over the same ground. The key question is how to can operators make money by addressing smaller audiences profitably.
The short answer is if you get the digital experience right, customers are satisfied. Telness does guarantee to answer customers’ calls within 60 seconds but this is possible because those calls are so rare.
Watch the video here to find out more, including about expansion plans for the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and the UK with Telness Tech and its expertise. Klingsvall says there just aren’t many companies offering what her company offers and it will be launching 11 more brands too this year.