Microsoft Partners, ignoring Customer Success could be your biggest mistake!
Bertha Musanhu
Microsoft Partner Success - Helping you realise your full benefits with actionable strategies and step-by-step guidance.
Customer Success Defined
According to Gartner, Customer success is a method for ensuring customers reach their desired outcomes when using an organization’s product or service.
A relationship-focused Customer Success strategy includes:
1. involvement in the purchase decision,
2. implementation and use of products or services and
3. customer support.
Why is it important for you to understand Customer Success?
If you are a Microsoft Partner aiming to get a Solutions Partner Designation for Business Applications or just looking at maintaining your Designation, you will know that of the 100 points up for grabs, the Customer Success Metric holds 50 points. The most out of the 3 metrics. So yes, it’s a big deal!
The Customer Success metric for Microsoft Business Application Solutions Partner Designation measures your ability to enable growth in the use of Microsoft products or the expansion of Microsoft's services and workloads utilized by customers.
Consider this when thinking of a customer who is testing your team.
“Treat every project as a future reference, testimonial, and opportunity to grow your customer success points”.
Some customers roll out Dynamics to the whole organization in one go and other customers take a phased approach to allow them to test whether the solution will deliver on the projected KPIs. The companies with the phased approach are not only testing the Microsoft Product but they are also testing YOU!
You have to deliver value across the whole delivery chain if you want to be successful, meet the customer’s objectives, and tap into the opportunity to grow into more business units within the customer organization.
Customer Success is everyone’s responsibility!
In my experience, if an organization does not adopt a Customer Success mindset at its core, the corresponding actions of the team may fall short when it comes to achieving the customer's objectives.
Every team member who is a part of the value chain needs to be customer centric, they must have these questions in mind as they deliver:
“How does this impact the customer's objectives?”
“Will this action serve the customer's interests?”
From Marketing, Sales, Delivery, Training, Support, and Invoicing your whole team should be driving Customer Success.
One Connected Customer Experience
What many partners do not realize is that, if one team in your delivery chain is not aligned with the customer's objectives, it can destroy the sentiment completely. This will render useless any other actions by other teams that may have earned 5 stars on their delivery.
Have you ever heard a customer say during project delivery,
“But your Sales agent said we could get that and it doesn't look like you delivered on it”
This is a sign of misalignment between the Sales team and Project Delivery team or it could even be a failure to manage stakeholder expectations.
End users have been known to get upset in the training room because they can’t see how the built solution will improve efficiencies for them. No one consulted them or got their buy-in!
The question should then be asked, did we manage the end user, as a stakeholder? Failure to prioritize the end users can result in low adoption and usage of the system, impacting your customer success metrics. Whose job was it to manage their expectation? This scenario presents a disconnected customer experience and possibly value chain misalignment.
And lastly, the customer complaining about how your support team has no clue what they are doing because "they don’t know anything about the work done!”
These statements from customers indicate a misalignment of the customer's objectives across the whole value chain and they are a very high risk for Customer Success.
“Customers will simply not use your solution if they feel that the final delivery does not meet their objectives”.
What is Microsoft Measuring for the Customer Success Metric?
Usage growth
The customer success usage growth metric measures your ability to grow the usage and consumption of qualifying products.
You earn points in this metric for the growth shown in the monthly consumption value across all of your qualifying customers and workloads.
To enable measurement and assessment of success across all these workloads, the monthly consumption value is defined as:
Monthly consumption = (monthly active users or capacity) * consumption rate. Rate card available here.
Monthly consumption value is used instead of monthly active users to include capacity-based workloads (such as Customer Insights) and to include a workload-based weighting using the consumption rate.
Remember that you can get these details from Partner Centre.
Eligible workloads
Eligible workloads include Business Central, Common data service (Customer organization, Core HR, Customer Insights Partner, Finance & Operations, Guides, Portals, Power App, Power Automate, Power BI, Talent Attract, and Talent Onboard.
Deployments metric
The deployments metric is a measure of your ability to grow the deployments of qualifying products. You earn points for this metric based on the growth in customer deployments of, eligible workloads with a minimum monthly usage level.
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"Treat every project as a future reference, testimonial, and opportunity to grow your customer success points."
You have an opportunity to grow a customer base or to use that successful project as a Case Study for future Sales.
Calculation
(Eligible deployments last month) – (Eligible deployments same month last year)
Point to note on Data freshness
Performance and Customer Success subcategories are typically refreshed by the 20th of every month. However, there may be more minor data refreshes throughout the month.
This is important for Partners who are actively working on getting associations and those who are proactively tracking their metrics. Aim for this date to avoid the frustration of checking every day! Trust me, I know that pain.
The customer success metric is weighted heavier than the other metrics in the Business Applications Partner program, so it's important to focus on this area if you want to earn and maintain a Solutions Partner designation for Business Applications.
Tips to improve your Customer Success score.
Here are some tips for improving your Customer Success score in the Business Applications category:
This is the most important metric for the customer success category, so make sure you're tracking your monthly consumption and setting goals for growth.
Provide training and support to help your customers use your solutions effectively. This will help them get more value from your solutions, which will lead to increased monthly consumption.
Keep track of the number of new deployments you're making each month. This will help you identify areas where you can improve your deployment process and increase the number of deployments you're making.
By following these tips, you can improve your Customer Success score and earn a Solutions Partner designation for Business Applications.
Not sure how you are tracking customers' usage?
1. Do you have associations with your customers that are visible in Partner Centre?
2. Are you utilizing your reports from Partner Centre to drive discussions with your customers regarding user adoption?
If you do not know how to do this or if you are struggling to understand the reports book an appointment here.
Conclusion
You cannot afford to drop the ball with Customer Success.
You will miss out on a chance to:
Drive Customer Success as business objective across the whole department to succeed as a Partner.
Make these areas a priority.
1. Getting the Designations
2. Maintaining the Designations
3. Earning incentives and rebates aligned to these designations.
STAY WINNING!
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Dynamic Educator & Curriculum Developer | Skilled in Training & Facilitation | 10+ Years of Assisting Clients and Colleagues Write Essays, Documents, and Correspondence | Entrepreneur | Self-motivated
1yBertha, understanding customer success is crucial because it directly impacts any organization's performance and success. It influences its ability to achieve growth in not only customer usage but also in customer adoption. By placing customer objectives as a priority, fostering team alignment, and delivering value across the entire delivery chain, a company can propel customer success, distinguish their organization, and unlock incentives and rebates.