Talking with Sarah Graham Linares, VP of Revenue Assurance and Product Development, TMC Communications

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

TMC Communications (News - Alert) (www.tmccom.com) – no relation to the TMC that publishes this magazine – is a telecom service provider and reseller that offers a wide range of long distance, local, VoIP, data and enhanced services to businesses nationwide.

An innovative company that’s experienced enough to handle the complex demands of large enterprises yet nimble enough to offer individual attention to customers, its 99 percent customer retention rate results from a combination of 24/7 assistance, the ability to develop superlative and cost-effective solutions for each unique situation, not to mention their ability to negotiate the best deals with top U.S. carriers. (Aside from its own network, TMC delivers services through such major long distance and data partners as Qwest, Global Crossing (News - Alert), Verizon, AT&T, Level (3), and PAETEC.)

All TMC services are sold exclusively through a nationwide team of experienced, independent telecom Agents. To learn more about TMC’s successful relationship with the channel, Yours Truly recently spoke with Sarah Graham Linares (News - Alert), Vice President of Revenue Assurance and Product Development.

RG: You work closely with your Agents.

SGL: We’ve supported the Agent channel exclusively since our founding in 1997. We support about 300 Agents, about 100 of which are very active, quoting and selling our services. We’ve been a provider of voice data and all the products that surround voice and data. We focus on solutions selling – not just selling the cheapest rate per minute. We wrap products around our services such as products that support inbound call centers. Our customers may need advanced toll-free services or TDM and/or VoIP. We can provide all of those types of things. If they require data services, they can call upon a network managed services product we call Titan that allows us to do bandwidth management on that data circuit and helps them manage the data coming in-and-out of their site. Titan monitors a network and provides reports on metrics relating to applications, sites and network link performance. It even provides MOS [Medium Opinion Scores] and enables users to maintain and prioritize the bandwidth different applications need so that things like video downloads don’t interfere with VoIP calls.

We support Agents in a unique way – because we have so many we want to be as efficient for them as for us. Our many automated tools allow us to provide quotes to them quickly. If they’re out in the field and they need a quote for a particular customer, they can either call us and we’ll service them that way, or else they can log into our automated tools and indicate that, ‘I am at so-and-so address and here’s the phone number. I would like a quote on voice and data services, and some other products available around this address.’ So it’s important that we not only support them from a product standpoint, but that we work in tune with the way they work. If they need a quote at Midnight, they have the access to get one from us. Moreover, those tools in the background are all very automated and instant in nature, so if they’re looking for a quote on voice, they’ll get instant quotes on the local loop provider or the port for data, the rate per minute, or whatever is necessary for the Agent to do business. Then they can pick what commissions they want. Agents want to sell services at rates that are good for both them and their customers – if they can get a 25 percent commission, obviously they’ll go for it. But if the market is pushing them down to something more like 10 percent, we’ll give them all sorts of mix-and-match commission options in conjunction with our tools, so they might receive, for example, 10 percent on voice but 25 percent on data.

From the voice side, we’re usually dealing in per-minute rates. If an Agent can sell a service for 2 cents a minute, then they’ll get a pretty high commission. If they need to sell it for somewhere just over a penny, they’ll get less of a commission. But we also can put customized proposals together – on the voice side it’s all about the patterns of calls that are made. A customer always calling the NFL cities and RBOC areas means that they’ll enjoy a cheaper rate per minute. Agents just need to know where their customer is. Same thing with data. We can sell them an Internet-type product, a private line, MPLS, or we can help them design a network to suit the customer and we can throw in some other types of products such as Titan to help them manage their network.

RG: So there are a series of predefined packages?

SGL: Although we have flat rates – since Agents prefer them – we also offer what we call ‘pinpoint pricing’ which allows an Agent to get the CDR (call detail record) that they get from their current provider and provide that to us and we’ll run our rates over that traffic and provide them with something like a customized proposal that says, ‘The best carrier for you is Carrier X.’ Or perhaps there’s a Least Cost Routing opportunity where we can includeseveral carriers in the customer’s network designand not only provide them with lower rates but also disaster recovery and multicarrier solutions so they continue to have service even if a particular carrier has an outage. So yes, there are ‘packages’ that we can assemble, but although we can put together a package for a customer, you can mix-and-match between our many products and design exactly what the customer needs. Sometimes you need to sell one thing to get in the door and then you sell them something else next month.

To ensure that we are on-track with our Agents and we’re in alignment concerning what products they’re selling and what our support looks like, we have an advisory council that consists of our top Agents, with whom we meet quarterly. This allows us to be informed as to what they’re hearing in the field. What do they need in the marketplace? What new VoIP, data or unified communications product do they need and how can we help them deliver them to their customers? We also conduct lots of training, because everyone needs to understand what’s going on in the marketplace and what the products are. So we do things such as hold webinars often with our Agents. Sometimes they’re carrier-specific, sometimes they’re product specific, or sometimes we’re holding training on tools that we’re offering to our Agents.

RG: Can your services be rebranded?

SGL: Some Agents do choose to rebrand the services, but most of the time they’re selling TMC. If the Agent is large enough, we’ll co-brand or put their name and logo on the bill, if that’s what they choose. So we really end up being their back office from beginning to end. Basically they get a commission on a monthly basis and we’ll take care of everything else. We also have a new product that allows clients to take what TMC can do on our switch and enables the client to be able to do it too. For example, TMC’s Be your own RespOrg service allows the customer to manage their own enhanced toll-free services. The customer can reserve their own toll free numbers, change routing (time of day, geographical, percent allocation) reroute toll free numbers to an alternative carrier in the case of an outage and manage their own account, vanity numbers, etc. by accessing the SMS database. TMC provides the training and support for this service.

Agents can be a one-man shop and it’s that guy and his computer, or they can be multi-layered with lots of staff and a back office behind them. But whatever the size of the Agent, we do the largest part of the work for them, depending on their choice. Sometimes they want to be very much ‘high-touch’ themselves and we let them guide us on exactly how involved they want us to be on a daily basis. Other Agents just bring us a customer and want us to completely manage the customer relationship after the sale. We love both types of Agents and will support either one as needed.

RG: What is your geographical coverage?

SGL: North America is our main focus, although in the new VoIP world there are call centers worldwide and ‘super call centers’ that may have three locations in the West and perhaps one in Costa Rica and one in the Philippines – we can support that type of customer too. For example, we have a very sophisticated Agent who sells to a particular vertical in the infomercial arena. He sells minutes to call centers that, when viewers see a toll-free telephone number flashing on their TV screens, call on the lines servicing that number. He can support that kind of call traffic volume to multiple call centers, since one center won’t handle it. The Agent supports many customers that exist as a sort of community of call centers, and he can move traffic back-and-forth between and among them, since we have the ability to allocate traffic between call center locations. These call centers are great customers and we are the first Tier-1 support for them with transport, billing and customer care, and the Agent is the salesperson who goes out and gets the deals.

RG: You appear to be heavily into customer service.

SGL: Yes. Several years ago we introduced a premier support program. Customers are assigned a dedicated support person who acts as their first line of support for questions about their account or service. They also get a monthly call from their premier support manager. to check in and to see how things are going and how’s their business doing and if we can help them with anything else. This proactive approach to customer service has been extremely well received by both customers and agents. Customers who bill at least $3,000 a month are automatically included in the program.

From our solution-based relationships with clients we get interesting feedback. For example, clients are asking for more SIP Trunks, which save money because the call traffic doesn’t go through the PSTN. This is inline with the analysts at Gartner (News - Alert) Group, who say that telecom spend won’t be going down but the market will be more specific on what and who they spend their money on. IT

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