User Review
( votes)In my previous article, I shared various observations and considerations regarding Microsoft’s CSP Template for Self-Service. I’ll explore further aspects of evaluating and implementing this template in this article.
Most companies are reacting to meet customer needs or fulfill the audit requirements from the Microsoft Direct CSP program. If you are in that small group that wants to have a strategic view of your customer experience and outcomes, here are some items you could think about:
Assessing Operational Impact
What is the operational burden on your team to manage a customer request for billing, changes, or pricing? The simple response is that these requests don’t take long.
This is true; however, the process often involves more than one step. For instance, when a customer reaches out, someone on the team must be available to handle the request. Customers may also want a quote or timeline; every change needs tracking.
So, the actual change doesn’t take time, but the flow from start to finish involves a few hands in the cookie jar!
Balancing Audit Requirements with Customer Experience
Is customer experience important, or are you merely completing an audit requirement? Are you creating systems and a culture to sell and grow in a way that aligns with the customer’s needs?
Are you addressing small, large, managed, and unmanaged customers in a way consistent with their processes and requirements? Are you locked into one Distributor?
Ensuring consistency in your service processes is critical to aligning with customer expectations.
What are your common use cases, or are you just reacting to the latest demo or idea you read somewhere? Below is a table that lists the most common use cases for customers. Here is a webinar link where I discuss the firsthand experience with some leading partners.
Common Use Cases
Below are some of the most common use cases around managing services and accurately billing for cloud services.
| Action | Customer | Implementation (Level of Difficulty) | Frequency |
| Onboarding A Customer New to CSP | New Customer | Very Hard | Rare |
| Transitioning Partner Relationships | New Customer | Hard | Occasional |
| Purchasing New Products and Services | Existing Customer | Medium | Common |
| Managing Changes to Existing Services Quantities | Existing Customer | Easy | Frequent |
| Viewing Invoices and Processing Payments | Existing Customer | Easy | Frequent |
Rating Explanations:
Level of Difficulty: The difficulty level is about the number of hours, cross-functional teams, systems, and coordination required to accomplish a use case.
- Very Hard and Hard: It involves multiple systems and processes, like CRM, billing, contracting, product catalog, and quotes, and will take up a lot of your time from multiple teams. It potentially involves a lot of internal change and integrations.
- Medium: Some level of involvement from teams and systems integration and can have some variability.
- Easy: Standard processes. No change or discussion is required. Usually, a notification is sufficient to implement this feature, and integration is done in a targeted environment.
Frequency:
Taking a customer-centric view is more important than the service provider’s view. Larger service providers may onboard more customers a month; however, the number of times the customer experiences the transaction is consistent regardless of the size of the service provider.
For example, whether the service provider is small or large, the customer will perform the contracting process and sign up once! The migration to Office 365 and setting up agreements happens once for the customer.
Another way to look at it would be the expectation of the team delivering the service. Support and customer service teams will usually engage with customers as part of their service agreement; however, sales, finance, and billing teams are engaged in a different cadence and usually with different stakeholders.
- Rare/Occasional: It happens once, if at all, in the customer’s lifecycle with you. It involves different stakeholders—not routine users.
- Common: These are the types of things that consistently happen across the customer’s lifecycle. They include renewals, invoicing, payment collection, and adding new services.
- Frequent: These actions are routine and considered part of the support and service they receive.
Strategic Benefits of Self-Service
Implementing a Self-Service Portal at the end of the day is a business decision – drive customer experience, build trust with end customers (enforced by enterprise customers), reduce the burden on your internal team, reduce errors by automating routine tasks, reduce friction, differentiate, and stand out.
It’s only a matter of time before a customer will drive you to make this investment. Getting ahead of it will help you close the deal or retain a customer.
What are some of the common objections or myths?
Risk of Errors: “Customers can make errors.” They can order the wrong quantity or forget that they requested a change.
Lack of control: “Customers may make changes we don’t want them to make.” Customers may order too much or buy certain expensive subscriptions without consulting or understanding the impact of what they are purchasing.
Irrelevance: “As a service provider, we are expected to make these changes!” This may be true for some end-users, but if the Portal is easy to use, it is not only a great convenience but a must-have for customers who want to self-serve.
These are perceived risks that can be managed with processes, notifications, and the right application.
Ideal Features in a Self-Service System
Having a system with notifications for change management and the guardrails around quantity changes is important.
A system should support alignment with internal processes and audit changes and keep all responsible parties informed.
Advanced features like permission controls for customer-initiated changes, adherence to commercial restrictions either internal or external (for example, NCE changes), and managing exposure on how much the customer can change, are valuable additions that any application should have.
Look for a system that has:
- Notifications for internal teams and customer teams
- A complete change log for subscription that includes who, when, and how the changes were made
- Features to control the subscription behavior for changes
- Roles and Permissions for what an end-user can do
Examples of features would be the ability to make changes in the positive direction only (increases), control how many seats can be added in one transaction, and simultaneously prevent certain subscriptions from any modifications!
Implementation Options: Off-the-Shelf, Custom, or Hybrid
Two approaches are purchasing off-the-shelf products or building something from scratch. This webinar has some good insights.
With either option, there are risks and benefits, including time to market, integrations, expertise, control, and financial investments.
One is faster and cheaper but with less customization and extensibility, while the latter is more expensive but could give you exactly what you need.
The commercial products can allow you to get started for as little as a few hundred dollars with a quick setup. The custom development approach can take years and cost millions of dollars.
However, what is often missed is the third option, a hybrid approach. This approach is available with products and offerings that use a platform approach like Work 365
A platform-based approach with something like Power Pages and Work 365, which provides both extensibility and the ability to get started quickly.
Evaluation Criteria
For an evaluation, consider the following key requirements. You may add your own weightage to these to help you make your decision.
- Branding: Is it easy to customize the look and feel for a consistent approach that aligns with internal Marketing guidelines
- Business Data: Are you able to expand your use cases?
- Billing & Payments: Are customers able to view, download, and engage on the revenue collection side?
- Services Management: Can the end-customer make controlled modifications to services that they have purchased?
- Dashboarding and Trends: Everyone loves a dashboard and a quick glance at the big picture.
- Purchasing and Product Catalog: How important is it that your customers make subscription purchases on their own? An important “gotcha” here is not to build a whole solution stack and system around the needs of one customer who wants to make their own purchases. Reference the frequency chart and challenge this requirement.
- Notifications: Can you build notifications with the ease and flexibility your business needs, including message templating, creating notification flows, and targeting the right contacts with the messages?
- User Controls, Authentication, Invitation: The Self-Service Portal is not intended to be a shopping cart experience. Are you able to selectively invite with the ease of authentication and permission management?
- Architecture and Integrations with Current Systems: What systems should a Self-Service Portal integrate into, and what are the key technical, master data strategies? Here is what a typical application infrastructure looks like at an MSP:
Reach out to me directly to discuss architectural or technical feature options in more detail.
Taking the Self-Service Portal to your Customer
Once you have a Self-Service Portal in place (it’s a great feeling), develop a go-live plan, and include customer communication, identifying the specific customer segments that will benefit most from this offering.
Customers with an internal IT team or some application knowledge will appreciate access to the Portal. Start with your most receptive customers and gradually scale up.
A well-implemented Self-Service allows you to control your CSP business on your terms.
Contact us for a demo or more information on how Self-Service Portals can benefit your business.
About the Author:
Ismail Nalwala is the CEO of Work 365, a CSP Management and Billing application built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Our global team is made up of game-changers who bring a unique combination of technical expertise, client empathy, and nerdy humor. Number crunchers and technologists at heart, our true passion is helping our customers succeed. Connect with Ismail on LinkedIn.
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