Crane aims to lift resellers' workload

Rebuilt e-commerce offerings bring success for telecoms distributor

Telecoms distributor Crane is claiming success after rebuilding its e-commerce offerings.

The company is using knowledge management to offer resellers FAQ support, software patches and presentations. Resellers can also hook their back-end accounting and inventory systems to Crane's.

"We tried to find out what the resellers wanted from e-commerce. They didn't want something that saved Crane money at their expense. They wanted us to make their jobs a bit easier," said Will Morey, Crane's strategic products manager.

"For example, we found that whenever the clocks went back or forward, our contact centre would be deluged with calls from customers who wanted to know how to change the time on their PBXs.

"Once we had got articles showing how to do this for all the models, people realised the value of it. There are now nearly 10,000 items in there."

Sandy Fitzpatrick, senior analyst at research firm Canalys, said the move showed Crane's intentions.

"This is an excellent thing to be investing in, especially as Crane is positioning itself as a converged distributor," she said.

"It will be a good hook to sign up converged telephony vendors. Crane has grown up on the back of Avaya, but it is being courted by other vendors as well."