When a customer engages a partner to enhance capabilities of an existing enterprise application or a technology product or to provide support services: runtime operations, system monitoring and management; application or product maintenance, is it the service partners’ business to learn more about the application system or product? With each incremental work delivered to the customer, is there an opportunity to learn more about how the application software or interfaces interacts with other systems, users or even external systems? As the partner stays engaged on the customer’s initiative, is there an opportunity for the service partner to learn and know the business functionality that the application delivers, the responsiveness of the application to the business user, the compute power utilization, data handling efficiency, existing data archival strategy and operations efficiency, opportunity to reclaim resources, how efficiently the message queues work, cost of maintenance of the system that customer incurs for the licenses and hardware etc.
If we are not doing all this, then are we truly partnering with our customers? There is a huge scope of learning and involvement for a partner who is interested in helping the customer maximise the utilization of the investments already made by the customer. With some conscious guidance, the partner has the capacity to save costs of operations, increase the productivity and efficiency of the application or product, improve the availability and security of the system. The opportunity exists with an involved service provider to constantly share the knowledge acquired, processed and analysed along with insight of the extent to which the brand can be enhanced and potential unleashed.
Additionally, is there any opportunity for the service partner to do out-of-band research about other more efficient and smarter products/solutions available which can guide the long term strategy of the customer?
If the answers to most of the probing questions is a ‘yes’, then what is stopping the service provider from taking the next leap and becoming true partners or engines of growth for customers? Is it the lack of an ingrained value system that is holding back most service providers from becoming service partners? We believe in a value system called SMILES – Sharing, Mindful, Integrity, Learning, Excellence and Social Responsibility. With this we aim to provide a great platform for our people to engage with our customers and truly live our mission statement.
Raju is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
