Reputation on the line:

TBM helps business telecom provider connect with customers

Blueface; A Comcast Business Company relies on partners to fulfil customer equipment orders. With TBM Solution, it meets service level agreements while enhancing its brand

Whether you’re running a consumer brand or a B2B play, delivering great customer experience is a must. As part of providing its unified communications services, Dublin-headquartered Blueface; A Comcast Business Company, ships headsets, peripherals and telecoms devices to customers in Ireland, Italy, and the UK. For this important task, it relies on a trusted logistics provider. 

“We’re not a distribution centre, we rely on trustworthy third parties to get a product from A to B. We believe in doing what we do well, and leaving that part to the experts,” says Mary Murray, Blueface’s VP of operations. 

But when Blueface’s existing partner left the market at the end of 2020, the company needed to find a reliable alternative – and fast. 

Meeting the logistical challenges of multiple sales channels

To make things more complicated, Blueface has multiple sales channels. As well as providing services through its own brand, it also white-labels its service for other telecom providers. Depending on which company the end customer is signed up with, the packaging and billing need to match. And as a B2B provider, Blueface needs to meet service level agreements with its customers, which means the products need to get to their destination within an agreed timeframe. 

“For us to commit to a level of service to our customers, we need a comfort factor that a distributor can commit to that level of service for us. The experience has to be seamless for the customer: it’s our reputation on the line. If you make a good impression, it lasts,” Mary adds.  

After scouting the market for a new fulfillment partner, Blueface identified TBM Solution and signed a new agreement in March 2021. 

Open lines of communication

From the start, Mary was impressed with TBM’s accessibility and availability. Blueface’s customers rely on their phones for their own business, whether they’re new customers getting devices delivered for the first time or it might be a replacement handset that’s needed in a hurry. 

“Things don’t always go to plan, and when the process doesn’t work for whatever reason, it’s important to have a way in to call the partner. It’s a comfort to me to know that I can make a phone call or email, and I’ll get speaking to one of the team at TBM Solution,” she says. 

Little details matter, too. When Blueface switched fulfillment providers, one of Blueface’s team visited TBM’s Dublin warehouse to see the stock. “There’s no red tape or someone saying: ‘you can’t come to our warehouse’. Things like that make it easy to do business with TBM Solution,” says Mary. 

TBM Solution also simplified the process of handling the products that Blueface supplies as part of its white-label agreement with another telecom provider. Equipment manufacturers send the stock directly to TBM, which assigns product codes depending on which provider’s name needs to be on the label. Once an order is received on its system, TBM then distributes the products directly to the end customers. 

Portal provides full visibility of stock and orders

Using TBM’s online portal, Mary and her team can quickly see stock levels at a glance. “We can see stock come in, we have full visibility from that, and that’s a big change previously working with spreadsheets,” she says. 

Working with TBM’s team, Blueface has also been able to level up its customer experience, replacing plain brown boxes with branded and designed packaging that TBM sourced. “The branded box was a significant milestone. In the past it was a manufacturer’s box the customer would see, and now it’s a Blueface box. It came about through those constant conversations with TBM Solution, where they would show us the warehouse or suggest where they could add value. In time, we’ll move to putting in our own inserts such as troubleshooting tips, and we’ll get TBM to do that for us,” says Mary. 

In early 2020, Comcast Business acquired Blueface and since then, the team in Ireland has more than doubled to 150. The business continues to hire and innovate to deliver its unified communications as a service offering. It’s also planning to sign another provider to a white-label deal, and Blueface can do this knowing its fulfillment service, managed by TBM, can easily handle the additional workload from its Irish warehouse and from its international locations. 

Mary is clear about the biggest benefit of the partnership: “It’s time. And that leaves me more time to spend on my team and on strategic decision-making. Right now, the TBM process takes up very little of my time and it shouldn’t, which is great. And when it needs my time, they’re there, flexible and available.”

 

 

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