New Commerce Experience Impact on Customer Self-Service – How Work 365 is Prepared!

Microsoft New Commerce Experience (NCE)

Most enterprises on the digital transformation journey rely on Microsoft CSPs to streamline the management of their subscriptions. Although Microsoft’s CSP program enables partners to create an extra revenue stream for their business, there is also the constant pressure to boost customer-centricity. Companies that seek minimal intervention from their CSPs are open to the idea of self-service, so they can manage and support their licenses and subscriptions without always having to fall back on their providers.

Self-Service until now

CSPs looking to deliver a unique experience for customers often adopt a self-service portal, so customers can resolve issues and challenges on their own rather than relying or engaging with the service provider.

It not only enables companies to manage the subscriptions with ease; it also allows CSPs to focus on areas that require more attention.
It enables CSPs to empower their customers and allow them to manage their licenses. Companies can easily and instantly add or remove licenses, get complete visibility over their licenses, while also keeping track of the renewal dates, procurement details, etc.
With business needs constantly changing, the portal allows companies to adjust subscriptions based on the situation – without relying on CSPs to make adjustments.
At the same time, CSPs can establish trust and transparency with their customers.
With Microsoft constantly launching an array of services, each priced differently, the self-service portal allows companies to monitor the pricing of different cloud services and find out how their budget is being spent – so they can manage their budgets more efficiently.
It also enables companies to uncover which products and services deliver the most value while keeping a track of consumption and usage data and deciding how they can optimize their usage to gain maximum benefits.
The self-service portal also simplifies billing and invoicing, and companies no longer have to rely on CSPs for generating their invoices. Since all bills and invoices can be easily viewed, downloaded, and managed from within the portal, they can have a real-time view of their invoices, be well-aware of billing issues, as well as optimize and manage their bills better.

NCE Ready?

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Microsoft CSPs Need Customer Self-Service Portals

Work 365 Latest Self-Service Portal Changes In-Line With New Commerce Experience

Customer self-service portals have been a selling point for MSP and CSP companies. By offering customers the ability to add and remove licenses as required, real-time provision and access licences, these customer portal has enabled them to streamline their license and subscription management process. Several customers across the world rely on self-service portal to manage their subscriptions. However, NCE is set to change how CSPs and partners do business.

With Microsoft New Commerce Experience in full swing, the ability to change quantities for customers on an annual commitment is going to get limited. However, Work 365 has made significant changes to its self-service portal capabilities for partners to continue to leverage the benefits of self-service.

With the launch of NCE, non-recurring items will also be supported on the customer self-service portal. Users can view and manage recurring subscriptions and one-time purchase items as well.
In addition to managing non-recurring items, customers can add one-time purchase items as well to existing contract. The new advanced capabilities within the customer portal will provide a look up field, allowing users to access and add eligible products only as defined within Work 365 product catalog as non-recurring items.
Another feature change includes, the ability for users to schedule license quantity change as required. Users can schedule new subscription or additional license quantity with the future effective date. These changes will allow customers to manage and control license changes easily and efficiently through the portal.
With changes scheduled for existing subscriptions, there will be a noted effective change date, the system automatically pushes the subscription change maintains license change log history for users to manage audit and reconciliation.
When applying schedule quantity change on an existing subscription, a schedule change log on that subscription will be created – with the effective date as defined by the companies. When the future effective date of the scheduled quantity change arrives, the portal will automatically push the quantity change to that subscription.
When the end-user modification is selected as ”Yes” at the subscription level to manage subscription quantities within the portal a new field for modification behaviour will be available. This will allow partners to control the direction in which subscription changes can be made by the end-user. End-users can either increase or decrease licenses, helping CSPs enforce contractual quantities they have with their customers. If a customer tries to carry out an action not supported, they will be notified accordingly.

Looking at the changes ahead with New Commerce Experience, the self-service portal is going to go under a major overhaul. Although self-service has long been helping customers to efficiently view, track, and manage their subscriptions, license changes, and invoices, some new changes and guardrails will further strengthen customer experience while making it easier for CSPs to support NCE roll out.

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