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Why Automation for Service Providers is So Critical

Microsoft Teams

August 8, 2024

Picture the assembly line at Toyota. Building millions of parts a year, the scale and success of manufacturers like Toyota would simply not be possible if it wasn’t for automation.

You’ve got assembly lines with robots handling tasks like welding, painting, and assembly. Quality control inspects components using automated vision systems.

Sure, there is human input to create such processes and to handle exceptions. That won’t go away. But these multi-billion dollar companies couldn’t deliver anywhere near as many complete vehicles if they reverted to manual processes.

This story rings true for service providers in the telecoms industry, too. Automation of service provider provisioning introduces more efficient processes, dramatically reduces upfront and operational overheads, and removes the potential for human error.

When delivering enterprise solutions at scale, a lack of automation correlates with a lack of new business.

Why automate in the first place?

In any telco, value added reseller (VAR), or peripheral supplier, there comes a time where new users, tenants, and licenses get created.

Before automation, your business must rely on humans. Now, humans are great. I, like you, am a human. However, that means I am also flawed.

It’s widely documented the types of issues that can occur when rely on manual processes:

Slow turnaround times
User licenses only partially provisioned
Tenant-wide changes impacting usability
Wrong MAC addresses assigned to devices
Overcharging due to the wrong license being assigned

These errors result in three outcomes:

Service
downtime

Disgruntled customers

Duplicated
work

Now, we’re not suggesting you remove humans from this process entirely. Instead, you can use humans for more value-add tasks. They can be the people informing the automation, writing the scripts, gathering requirements, and conducting quality control.

If the “before state” was time-consuming and prone to error, the “after state” must be efficient and seamless.

Why automate now?

Through innovations in modern cloud technology (and yes, that does include artificial intelligence), we are able to carefully craft what gets automated.

Moreover, the possibilities of automation at different parts of the provisioning process are incredibly granular. Whether you choose to go big bang and automate your entire process or select a single area that proves the most cumbersome, we’re now able to create the automation, strength test it, and benefit from technology.

What if you choose to NOT automate?

You’ll be missing out on the benefits your competitors are already embracing:

Scalability: Building a large-scale Teams practice is impossible without automation at various parts of the journey.
Efficiency: You lose out on productivity gains and spend more time, resource, and money stuck in manual processes and repairing manual errors.
User Experience: Onboarding, adoption, and usability all get affected by slow response times.

As Robert Galop, Co-Founder of Creo Solutions, put in his blog post,

“The telecom industry is always changing with new technologies like AI, CPaaS, Network APIs, 5G, and IoT. Falling behind on these technologies means falling behind your competitors who are putting these new technologies to use.”

Use cases for service provider automation

1. Global expansion

Let’s say you want to build a worldwide practice without expanding your operations team tenfold. This is quite a common goal for service providers taking the leap from local to global provider.

Without automation, you’re going to incur:

Upfront costs: Labor, new staff onboarding, hiring.
Operational costs: Salary, cost of error, duplication.

The alternative, automating tenant-wide actions, lessens the dependence on humans, removes the potential for error, and allows you to scale indefinitely. If you can make a user change in London, you can apply the same behavior across all users, tenants, and enterprises in as many countries as you desire.

2. Creating an ecosystem of services

It’s not just basic user provisioning, we’re talking about. Take Microsoft Teams as an obvious example.

Provisioning a Teams environment is more than simply adding users to a tenant. On top of the actual user, you’ve got a vast ecosystem providing valuable third-party add-ons.

Each of these must consider their own automation. Failure to automate across the board has a detrimental impact on onboarding, adoption rates, and user experiences.

It’s no good a new user starting on day one with a Teams license if they can’t record calls, integrate with their CRM, or get analytics into their call center queues. That’s like buying a dog but failing to get a bed, bowl, or food. Sure, you have a dog, but it’s not the optimal package and you’re going to be forever playing catch up to cater to its needs.

As Paul Craft, Product Manager for Strategic Partnerships at Gamma, notes,

“Call analytics and reporting is a highly sought-after service bolt-on for Gamma’s Operator Connect and Direct Routing services, offering valuable insights that enhance customer communications and operational efficiency.”

3. Evaluating your total addressable market

The most successful service providers are those who care about the entire experience. These are the companies who are aware that as you add new services, there’s a downstream cost effect. E.g. network administration, dev ops, etc. If you’re not automating at the top, you can’t automate at the bottom.

This doesn’t just have a knock-on effect on productivity. It also has a major impact on your target customer base. Companies going after businesses with 200 or more users simply must have automation baked into their provisioning processes. Anything else is restricting the market you target.

As your target customer increases in size, and you reach enterprise level, a white glove approach is more favorable for initial roll out. There’s an expectation that you walk through requirements one-by-one. Each department may have unique needs that need manual changes that you can’t pre-program.

However, you’re still expected to provide these types of automation to avoid manual moves, adds, and changes en masse. Otherwise, you’re reliant on busy IT engineers never putting a finger wrong.

💡💡 On average, an enterprise affected by 120 provisioning errors in one month could end up losing more than $25,000 in lost employee productivity. That’s on top of the cost to IT.

Anecdotally, Mike Wilkinson, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Akixi, says,

“It’s not a quantitative assessment when figuring out whether to embrace automation. It’s a binary assessment. Service providers won’t deploy without automation as it’s simply unmanageable.”

Example: A relatively new VAR has a target of 150,000 net new Teams seats per year.
The stance isn’t “We’re not sure how much we can do without automation”. It’s “We can’t go to market without an automated provisioning solution”.

As providers of services like call center reporting and CRM integration, we often see service provider prioritization of automation over things like:

Attach rate
Cost of unit production
Value chain and branding
Risk assessment and sharing
Line of business systems integration

Differences between solutions built for end users vs service providers

When considering the platform(s) you will use for automation and provisioning, it’s important to understand the types on offer.

Vendors typically offer two deployment models:

Built for enterprises
Built for service providers

The table below outlines the differences between solutions built for each target audience.

HTML Table Generator

Built for enterprises	Built for service providers
Designed for users and admins who will consume the service	Designed for businesses that will support end users with multiple departments and groups
Not suitable for channel	Possible to enable channel partners (and partners of channel partners)
While scalable, often seen on a much smaller scale than service provider environments	Scalable and capable of handling high volumes
Single tenant deployment	Multi tenant deployment
Single hierarchy	Multi hierarchy
Strict boundaries for roles and access	Flexibility for different channels to add value in customer management
Limited control	Can grant granular access to enterprises
Suitable for irregular and non-urgent one-off changes	Best for moves, adds, changes, deletions at scale

How Akixi has automated service provider provisioning

While Akixi is involved with countless end user deployments and planning, the core platform and services are service provider-focused.

Our customers are people like you. We enable VARs, resellers, and service providers to provide efficient and automated provisioning of third-party services like Microsoft Teams and Webex, closing the loop on the collaboration ecosystem.

By reducing the friction of onboarding, partners can speed up their time to revenue and reduce associated costs of new product introduction.

The Akixi portfolio is built on three key pillars:

Revenue

Margin

Differentiation

So, if you’re looking to compete in a highly saturated Teams market, embrace automation at the core so you can create a genuinely scalable and user-first product offering.

The impact service provider provisioning has on end customers

It’s not just service provider efficiency we’re improving. Our customers’ customers are enjoying the benefits of automated provisioning and processes too:

Cost reduction
Rapid onboarding
Simplified mass deployment
Simplified mass moves, adds, and changes
Bundled UCaaS packages that provide a single solution

How can service providers scale automated provisioning?

Before you try to scale your product or service, you must ensure automation is at the heart of your core platform.

Whether you come from the Cisco world (via BroadSoft or other means) or Microsoft, the Akixi platform enables you to provide a wide range of value-add services at scale that strengthens your position in a crowded market.