Enterprise Ireland, Futurecurve and the development of our Value proposition
9.00am on another soggy Wednesday morning Ken Cahill and I wait in the reception of Enterprise Ireland. We were there for an update meeting and workshop with Helen Blake, Cindy Barnes from Futurecurve and Grainne Ryan our Enterprise Ireland DA
The team have been helping us develop Blueface’s Value Proposition. It is imperative that we understand our customers’ needs and identify the augmented benefits that come from using Blueface, before we engage in any significant marketing campaigns. The purpose of the workshop is to generate a greater focus on our Target market from an internal perspective; we have been working with Helen and Cindy to uncover the elements that lead to Blueface’s success. We attended a group workshop in October which provided us with a series of tools to help us identify the benefits our customers are most attracted to, the main features which seem to generate the greatest level of satisfaction are the low cost of calls, flexibility and scalability of the service as well as the consolidation of office technology into one phone or one device, these are all recognized as expected benefits from our business customers’ perspective.
The augmented benefits that come from this are improved time management, an increase in cash flow as telephony costs drop, ability to work anywhere and the most exciting benefit being the ability of any company to have ‘virtual international offices’ in the UK, US etc. This provides smaller emerging businesses with an opportunity to test the export market without the need for heavy international investment.
At the core of our business is the promotion of communication. Obviously it’s in our interest to promote ourselves in line with this, the success of Blueface depends heavily on businesses in Ireland and the UK empowering themselves by taking control of their own communications model, for far too long the SME and residential markets have fed into the telecommunication ‘cash cow’ for the sole reason of increasing resale value. The incumbent provider continues to stifle the Irish market by charging ‘money for old rope’. The IP communications platform is a far more exciting proposition, bringing all the standard features of a telephony system into the 21st Century.
Alan