Technology providers must battle-test their promises to be true enablers
By Jevon King, CSO at Backspace Technologies
Doing business in South Africa is rewarding but it can also feel like a feat of endurance. Volatile exchange rate, fuel price fears, infrastructure and energy challenges, and a host of other points of friction demand both hands on the wheel. Whether a business is an SME or enterprise-level operation, connectivity – the very foundational technology for modern business – should be a pleasant wind at your back and not another headwind slowing you down.
Yet, for far too long, businesses have accepted a transactional relationship with their technology providers. Businesses can no longer afford to treat digital infrastructure as a secondary concern. It has evolved into a utility, as vital as water and electricity, and because of that, businesses of all sizes have a right to demand a level of accountability that matches that reality.
The cookie-cutter barrier
A sizeable barrier to growth is the rigid, bureaucratic “cookie-cutter” approach to service that we see everywhere. The norm is siloed structures where a simple decision or task can take weeks to action. The customer is forced to fit the provider’s processes rather than the provider being agile enough to solve the customer’s problem when it arises.
Enablement is the opposite of this. Enablement, in its purest form, is when a provider gives its customer the ability to carry out its daily tasks without needing to worry about the tools that make them possible. When technology is working correctly, it should be invisible. When it fails, the impact is felt immediately.
The commercial edge that makes it real
Quick decisions, made with conviction, are often the difference between a customer who signs and one who walks. But those decisions don’t sit exclusively at the top. Every sales expert and specialist on the team is trusted to make their own commercial calls within defined parameters. When a call doesn’t go as planned, the expectation isn’t to escalate and wait, it’s to own it and find the fix.
The same urgency we expect from our network is the urgency we bring to the commercial conversation at every level. A slow sales process in a fast market is its own form of downtime. It’s easy to write about accountability and enablement — it’s another thing entirely to build a business where the people driving growth operate by the same standard they’re asking customers to expect.
How important is 10 minutes?
Consider the cost of failure in a network of thousands of devices in stores across the country. If a device goes down, even for 10 minutes, the loss of income for the vendor is massive. The vendor simply doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for a support ticket to be processed through a multi-layered corporate structure. Hardly has the old adage been more relevant: time is money.
It’s precisely in moments like these where the old transactional model between a technology partner and its customers breaks down. When the stakes are this high, a business doesn’t need a supplier, it needs a partner who understands that their uptime is directly related to profitability, or to be even more direct, livelihoods.
A R500-a-month customer and a million-rand enterprise contribute to the same economy and they both deserve the same standard of excellence. Reliability shouldn’t be a tiered luxury. Wear the hat of a reseller or channel partner for a moment: They rely on their provider to keep their customers connected. If their customer’s connectivity drops they need to be 100% sure that their provider has enough skin in the game to ensure rapid resolution.
Skin in the game
The industry, sadly, has a reputation for being hard to reach and slow to react. How do we change this? The answer, unsurprisingly, lies in radical accountability, and what better way to achieve this than by asking technology providers to put their money where their mouth is.
A provider cannot, in good conscience, recommend a technology or a solution to a client that it hasn’t battle-tested with its own capital first. If a provider’s own shareholders and sister companies don’t rely on the very tech stack they are selling, why should the market? This shift guarantees the urgency and availability required to operate in a high-stakes environment.
Innovation for inclusion
In South Africa, the discussion about connectivity goes beyond reliability. One of the main hurdles in Africa is data scarcity. It is a precious commodity, often acting as a barrier to entry for education, emergency services and economic engagement.
If we are talking about enablement, then why should it stop at the customer? By allowing businesses to enable their own customers and broaden the base they can reach, we are driving inclusion. Reverse billing becomes a tool for digital equity. By allowing the owner of a service – whether that’s an educational platform, a gaming app or financial services platform – to shoulder the data cost, we remove the pay-to-play barrier for the end user.
The path to enablement
Ultimately, the goal of any technology partner, one that serves customers directly and also works with channel partners, should be to build the fabric that allows businesses to scale. It requires providers willing to break the process when the process isn’t working. Businesses are constantly innovating and they require connectivity partners who are agile enough not just to keep pace, but to enable them.
That’s because the “secret” to success in this industry shouldn’t be a secret at all: it’s about accessibility, transparency, and a relentless focus on enablement. We aren’t just selling boxes or cables; we are selling the certainty that when a business’s staff show up to do their job, the world is ready to receive them.
