Cloud9 Business Services Microsoft Partner Support -

How can Cloud9 Business Services support Microsoft Partners?

If you’re looking for a partner who can help you make the implementation of your clients’ Teams projects a success every time, you have come to the right place.

Cloud9 Business Services was set up by people who came from a partner background, have worked with the technology for years and really know how to add value to your proposition.

We have been on both sides so we also recognise how essential it is to understand your customers so that we get maximum people engagement and great results every time.

Consultancy and Implementation

Achieving your customers’ objectives is key to building long-lasting relationships and increasing revenue. That’s why we have created a process that gets closer to your customers and helps us understand what are the keys to success for each project.

You need a partner who can drive user adoption so that Teams delivers what we all set out to do. It’s where we do our best work and why, by carrying out detailed discussions with your customers, we achieve their end goals.

So how do we go about this?

‘A Day In The Life’ Audit

This is our way of finding out how a business or a team within it, really operates. These are the ‘What, Where, Why and How’ questions that have to be asked in detail to ensure we can implement your project successfully. This is what we cover:

What does the business do?
What type of customers does it serve and what are their expectations?
Who must be involved in the project?
What are they trying to achieve?
What are their frustrations?
Will people be using desktops, mobiles devices or both?
What does the IT infrastructure look like?
What are the key team or business objectives?
How could Teams help them achieve their goals?
What could prevent Teams from working within the organisation?
What are the barriers to change?
How do we ensure everybody uses the system?
How does training need to be tailored to work for the customer?
How will success be measured?

Keeping The Board Happy

At Cloud9 we think if Teams is going to work, it needs everyone in the business to enjoy both using it and the benefits it brings. But the fact is, the people who drive the success of the project are the Directors who manage the budget and can influence organisational change.

This is where we can add value for you. You provide us with the key objectives of the project and we will provide regular updates to you to demonstrate progress against those targets.

Often there are priorities. A sales team that needs to work more effectively, a customer service team that needs better access to information and decision making, fixing relationships between marketing and other departments and many more.

Your clients’ boards want a return on their investment. That will mean different things to different businesses but ultimately your customers want more productivity, better customer service, increased sales, better staff engagement. We get that and it’s why our training and the way we work with you as a partner is designed to achieve those goals every time.

Operational Feedback

Many end users want to understand the barriers to ensuring Teams will be a success in their organisations. When that client selects our consultancy service, we help you as a Partner get that information and feed it back through professional reports to key stakeholders.

Cloud9 uses our expertise to consult users across a client’s organisation. This gives us a detailed understanding of how the business operates in terms of communication and working together. Having done this there are a range of documents we can create and recommendations we make that include:

User crib sheets
‘How To’ videos
Short operational guides
Operational risks based on usage, external clients and so on
Recommended policies to manage risks
Additional hardware that may be required
Current platforms being used as an alternative to Teams and how to get everyone using the system
Reasons for lack of engagement and how to overcome them

This is an important and sometimes, complex job. Never underestimate how much time and work this can save you as well as ensuring the implementation is fully compliant with company guidelines. Most importantly, it will significantly increase the probability that your clients will see the highest levels of user acceptance and engagement giving them a measurable return on their Teams investment.

Integrating Voice

More companies want to integrate calling solutions into Microsoft 365. It makes life easier and more productive. Our expertise is in voice solutions. So not only do you get a highly knowledgeable consultancy who can implement your projects and train your clients, you also partner with a specialist who can help you overcome the challenges of voice integration.

Training

Your customers will only make Teams work in their businesses if they know how best to use it. This is one of our most important functions both for companies implementing Teams for the first time and for those who want to get more from the platform they’ve been using.

To ensure your implementations work, we find the most effective way to deliver training that works is by recruiting ‘Super Users’ from across your customer’s business. We regularly bring together managers or key personnel from different business functions to learn the system in detail so they can implement in the most effective way for their own teams.

A typical training room will have representatives from Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Operations, Procurement, Finance, HR and Logistics. Of course, this always depends on the size of the business and the types of functions that will be using the system. But the one thing we know is that if we get advocates from each team working with us from the outset, really understanding how to get the best out of Teams for their own functions, the probability of your project’s success increases exponentially.

Training days are tailored for each customer. Sometimes we have to concentrate on a particular part of a business, others we get all departments working together to achieve company-wide adoption. We encourage discussion amongst all of our trainees to help us identify any barriers within the organisation that would slow user adoption, cause IT problems or cause issues with current working practices.

Our training works because the people within your customer businesses who have to make it work are able to problem solve in a room together. They work out how best to use Teams in their company environment and make sure everybody wants to use it rather than having to.

Building this advocacy and capability amongst a core ‘Super User’ Group is vital to the success of your programmes and something we are very proud of. This is how you can be sure we are the ideal partner to work alongside to implement Teams to your customers.

Why Cloud9 Business Services?

Implementing Teams can be a complex and time-consuming project for your business. This is what we do 24/7 with years of experience in implementing large scale technology projects and the culture change programmes that go with them. This means you can concentrate on building your business, whilst we do the hard work of ensuring your projects are successful.
We come from partner backgrounds. We know the challenges you face and we know how to help you overcome them. It also means we can represent you on conference calls and in person with your clients without any fear that we will let you down. We won’t!
You can be assured that we have a structure to our implementations. That way you get consistent delivery against deadlines and objectives. But we also recognise that things don’t always go to plan. We are a business that is large enough to provide the professionalism and cover that you need but small enough to genuinely care. It gives us great flexibility and means if something has to change quickly on a project or goes wrong on a training day, we can manage it without fuss. You won’t hear us say ‘It has to be that way’.
We’ve worked extensively in Public Sector and the NHS. Use our experience to help you implement Teams into this growing market in the most effective way.
We make a point of integrating with your team as closely as possible to deliver a successful project every time. We regularly liaise directly with the project engineers. This allows us to work on the project with the people on the frontline, speeding up the process and making it easier for all concerned. But communication is vital to us and so we always report back to your project manager to ensure everybody knows what is happening.
Customer experience and satisfaction is at the heart of everything we do. We see it as our job to make your organisation look as professional as possible to all of your clients. This means you can be guaranteed that if we say we are going to do something, we will. It’s one of our fundamental business values.
Professionalism is everything to us. We know what you need as a partner and you’ll find us responsive to every request, every engagement with you and your clients and a sharp eye for detail that delivers exactly what your project is designed to achieve.

If you need an implementation partner to help you deliver more Microsoft Teams projects and want to see why Cloud9 could help you grow your business, come and talk to us today.