WE TALK TO ANDREW AND SARAH FROM BOXER COMMUNICATIONS

What happens when you combine a sales driven professional trained in hospitality, a telephony engineer with a Film and Television background and the Telstra Accreditation Program? You get Boxer Communications.

Boxer Communications is located in York Street in Sydney’s CBD, right in the middle of one of Australia’s most dynamic business environments. Owners and partners Andrew Bokser and Sarah Lai have seen the business grow from a small Telstra Agent in 2004 needing to sell one Telstra product each week to now being one of the country’s most successful Telstra Business Centres.

To their credit, and one of the underlying reasons for their success, is the fact that the very first sale Andrew made back in 2004 was to a company that is still one of Boxer’s best clients today. “Yes, when we get a customer, we work hard at keeping them” Andrew said.

“We see ourselves as representing Telstra Business and I have no doubt that our customers see us as Telstra. It’s really that simple. We are a Telstra Business Centre and as far as our customers are concerned, there is no difference in their minds. That’s why it is so important that our business and our staff present ourselves with the same degree of sales and technical expertise and the professionalism Telstra demands of its staff.”

“I can remember the moment when everything changed for our business. It happened for us when Telstra introduced us to the Telstra Business Accreditation Program. Telstra explained the new program to us, told us about the plan to help us achieve Accreditation and Certification plus support for our business. We went with it and after we achieved our Total Solutions Accreditation the business grew. Pretty soon we found ourselves in a position where we had the opportunity to become a Telstra Business Centre. There’s was no stopping us on that one. David Thodey and Deena Shiff even came to help us celebrate the opening of the Business Centre”.

“Accreditation and Certification were the pathways that enabled us to become a Telstra Business Centre. That was a very powerful thing for our business because going through Telstra Business Accreditation proved to us, and to Telstra, that we had the skills and the drive to be an effective and successful Telstra Business Centre”.

Sarah made a point of saying “Our business is booming. We now have close to twenty employees and being right in the middle of the city we have so much potential. The Telstra Business Centre has been the key to our growth and the Accreditation and Certification gave us the customer identification and the highly trained, knowledgeable staff which in turn helped us to grow Award for your business customers”.

“We think that we need to take full advantage of the position we find ourselves in today and that is a challenge, not just for us, but for Telstra and for other Telstra Business Centres in our region” she said.

“Sarah’s right” Andrew explained. “With the growing number of TBC’s and the increasing needs of the Australian business community for support and assistance, we should find new ways to co-ordinate and combine the marketing activities of Telstra and its partners so that we are all talking with the same voice, taking the same message, even the same product offerings to market. That way, I can combine my marketing funds with other Telstra Business Centres in my region so that we can really get the ‘bang for our collective co-op bucks’. I think that would be a great outcome for us all. We all win when we get new clients, Telstra, us and all the Telstra Partners”.

“We’d like to see other Telstra Business Centres in the Sydney region getting together, working collaboratively and marketing together under the Telstra Business Centre brand, work out our offers and go to market with joint advertising. We think that could be very powerful.”

Sarah went on to explain “We are not a huge business with a big marketing budget, so sometimes we feel limited in our ability to tell the market about our services. We’re not competing with other Telstra Business Centres, so we’re looking to work with other TBC’s to make the most of the budgets we do have”.

Boxer Communications has embraced staff training and development as an effective way to build sales. Like most business owners, Andrew developed his skills early because he was keen and eager to get somewhere in business. “I was like a sponge for information. Sarah had a technical background and achieved her degree in telephony engineering so together we make a great team because we’ve got the skills we need”.

“We understand how important training is for our staff and for the growth of the business. The Certification training has been just the right thing for our business. We combine Certification together with regular product training provided by our suppliers, they’re always keen to do that for us, and we combine it with our own in-house training sessions so that we all get a balanced program of both sales and technical training. You just have to keep doing it because things change so quickly in our business”.

Boxer’s approach: “We’re a whole-of-business solution for our business customers”. It clearly works for them and for their customers.