Enabling BI to remain competitive

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), you are in the business of delivering top-notch Cloud services to your clients. But to excel in a competitive market, you need to have a deep understanding of your clients, your services and competition. This is where both quality billing data and Business Intelligence (BI) become relevant.

Importance of BI

We understand the importance of BI for MSPs. Our solution often becomes a pillar within an organisation where multiple data streams converge. As our clients became aware of the amount of data flowing through our solution, we received more and more questions regarding the behaviour and trends of their clients, services and relative performance.

 The most requested topics are:

• Identify cost savings opportunities

• Understanding service and customer profitability

• Enhance client satisfaction

• Order to Cash automation

In this blog I want to highlight ‘Understanding service and customer profitability’.

Understanding your services and offers

It is not uncommon that Managed Service Providers partake in tenders as part of their strategy to acquire new customers. Often, the government issues contracts through tenders. To win these tenders, it is important that you can make offers that are very competitive. To gain an edge you can let a third party benchmark your offers and learn your offers’ strong points and areas of improvement.

A real-world example: one of CloudBilling’s customers has used our BI dataset to perform an in-depth analysis into all their running contracts and the actual invoices sent. Each contract with the associated invoices was linked to the respective cost of both the respective services and entire organisation. This gave them valuable insight into their margins of all their contracts and different services they provide.

Combining the third-party benchmarking analysis with their own analysis, they were able to identify key areas where they could improve their offers while keeping their offers profitable and competitive. This enabled them to become more competitive when bidding on (government) contracts through tenders. In other words, they were able to win more tenders because of their ability to submit sharper offers, with Business Intelligence based on billing data.

Next steps

For this client this was only the first step in utilising BI and billing data. Next steps are to identify upsell opportunities for sales, track budgets & profitability of projects and improve customer satisfaction and customer retention.