In the three years since it became a Tele2 IoT reseller, IoT Value is not only serving the Norwegian market, but also several European markets. What the company brings to the table is guidance: IoT Value lets its customers be experts in their fields, whether that’s computer science, electronics, or even connected livestock, while offering the IoT expertise that they need.
Three years ago, IoT Value CEO Jo Sundheim was a customer of Tele2 IoT, working with GPS tracking services in Norway. During this time, he attended IoT Talks in Stockholm, where he got very excited about the customers and the possibilities around IoT. This led to him asking a Tele2 IoT manager if there was an opportunity to become a reseller for Tele2 IoT. The answer was yes, a contract was signed, and the rest is history.
“I would say it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship with Tele2 IoT,” says Jo Sundheim, CEO IoT Value. “We sell Tele2 IoT’s offering and products and while we started with the Norwegian markets, we’ve moved into other European markets, such as Italy and the Netherlands, with the help of Tele2 IoT, which passes on leads to smaller customers and startups who have limited needs when it comes to SIM cards and who probably need a lot of assistance in their first six to twelve months.”
Focus on the customer
While a lot of IoT Value’s customers are experts in their own fields, they need IoT guidance when it comes to things like which chip set to choose, or things around batteries, antennaes, or protocol. Sundheim says customer service is at the core of IoT Value’s business model, allowing them to act as a guide in helping customers get the best from their IoT solution and also handle various challenges that arise.
“It’s important for customers to understand how they’re going to communicate with their device,” says Sundheim. “They might be downloading too much data they don’t need too often, or maybe they have a battery capacity that doesn’t make sense when it comes to getting a product to the market – these are some of the things we help our customers with. We ask them how they can make their device smarter, how they can lower their data – we ask them the questions that make things easier for them.”
Sundheims says Norway has only two major operators and neither one has 100% coverage, particularly when talking about applications that are underground or otherwise in remote or hard to reach areas. And if you don’t have the coverage you need your device is not going to work all the time. And what then often happens is companies end up having two batches of SIMs, which means they have to switch them all the time and manage two different platforms and in the end it’s a chaotic mess.
“Tele2 IoT’s roaming gives us a huge advantage over the competition,” explains Sundheim. “We talk to our customers and help them solve their challenges and this is where Cisco IoT Control Center is extremely helpful, because we can streamline our customers’ SIM management on it and see where there is a problem, such as when a device is going crazy, while also taking advantage of Tele2 IoT’s excellent tech support, which is super-fast.
