You have to hand it to the portal.
Of all the recent technological innovations aimed at digitally transforming the way business works, it has to be up there with the big disruptors.
It seems our insatiable workplace hunger for the simple, the quick and the efficient has intensified in tandem with the increasingly convenient and instantly-gratifying functionality of our personal devices.
Everything connected. Everything in one place. The world in the palm of our hands, so to speak.
In telecoms in particular – where necessary complexity competes constantly with users’ craving for single-click smoothness – the Service Management Portal (to give it its grand full title) has become a potent differentiator.
In a world where commoditisation of many of the individual components of a modern, efficient unified communications architecture has fuelled a race to the bottom on price, the smarts behind a brilliant, margin-rich, white-label SMP can change the game for service providers, System Integrators and Value-Added Resellers alike.
Picking the right partner is key.
“Onboarding, configuring, maintaining, even upselling - everyone wants simplicity,” says Kristian Karlsson, Product Manager at leading European UCaaS platform provider Dstny, whose powerful and clever ’Dstny for Service Providers’ SMP provides precisely that.
“That applies to the network provider, the Managed Service Provider AND the end user customer organisation. Simplifying processes and making many of them self-service positively impacts on productivity, efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.
“Time and expertise are both valuable resources so, when less of both are required to carry out more and more tasks, that impact becomes significant.”
Dstny’s hosted SMP puts that transformational power in the hands of system administrators who, in many cases, do not require the expensive and increasingly scarce skill sets that were once a pre-requisite when it came to the management of complex communications systems.
Today – despite so much riding on the unified and inter-dependent nature of those systems – intuitive and intelligent SMPs are able to provide users with an increasingly light-touch way of performing an increasing number of operational tasks.
It even starts right at the very beginning of the customer life-cycle - the selling process – with sales agents now using SMPs to demonstrate core solution functionality as well as the SMPs ability to manage it.
Once a deal has been won, organisations and/or their end customers are able to onboard using the SMP, connect end points to the network, configure preferences, monitor performance, fix issues, add and change users, and even capture and analyse user data to ensure optimum performance and design new, improved workflows.
All via the same platform and all with time (and cost)-saving simplicity.
