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.”
