Managing Microsoft Teams: A Prime Opportunity For MSPs

For many organizations, Microsoft Teams has become a cornerstone of workplace communication, enabling employees to stay connected, especially when working remotely.

Microsoft Teams has more than 320 million active users, and 86% of organizations view Teams as a strategically important application for their day-to-day operations.

Your customers rely on Microsoft Teams to stay productive and expect a seamless, user-friendly experience. If services aren’t working as they should the impact can be severe - leading to frustration and lost productivity. In short, any issues that arise must be fixed quickly.

Adding Value

Microsoft Teams presents a prime opportunity for MSPs to add value through offerings for monitoring and managing Teams performance and user experience. However, this is a crowded marketplace, with many MSPs now offering Teams-related services. In order to stand out, MSPs must demonstrate the unique value they offer over their competitors.

This relies on two key factors: superior service and operational excellence.

Superior service means addressing customer pain points while delivering reliable, seamless user experiences. Operational excellence means equipping your team with the right tools to easily manage offerings without adding to existing workloads. This means that your able to deliver services in a way that is efficient and cost-effective.

As well as offering services that will benefit customers, your Teams service offerings must also make money; creating revenue without incurring high costs. Microsoft Teams is integral to how many organizations operate, so if done right, embedding your offerings into this creates a lasting source of revenue.

Many of your customers already have longstanding subscriptions to Microsoft Teams and this in unlikely to change any time soon. If you can provide customers with uninterrupted, high-quality performance, Microsoft Teams managed services provide predictable annually recurring revenue (ARR) and customer retention.

To create a profitable managed service offering, MSPs must first establish the types of services they want to offer, and how they fit within existing Teams offerings. This might involve bundling a Teams service with related offerings, adding a new service, or tying your offerings into premium services such as Teams Rooms or Teams Phone.

Avoiding Management Complexity

Overseeing multiple services for multiple customers means MSPs rely on having the right management tools. Tools that are siloed or provide poor visibility hamper teams’ ability to efficiently solve customer issues and increase operational burden.

If teams become bogged down by reacting to customer issues and troubleshooting, they will have less time to focus on other higher-value tasks, driving up costs and eating into margins.

Consolidating tools so they are easier to manage, integrating views to improve visibility over customer environments and automating functions all help avoid this.

A Proactive Approach

Organizations rely on Microsoft Teams for their day-to-day operations, so any performance issues will not go unnoticed, and failing to provide a consistent, frictionless experience can damage customer relationships. Rather than only solving issues as and when they occur, a preemptive approach is key to avoiding disruptions. This means using synthetic testing to proactively monitor for issues before they affect users.

Martello’s Vantage DX is an integrated solution that goes beyond conventional monitoring to uniquely deliver not only proactive monitoring, but also automated root cause analysis and end-to-end network path tracing to discover where, why and how an issue occurred. Dashboards and drill downs across and among customer environments provide instant insights and intelligence to prioritize your client activities. These features allow you to address customer pain points without the typical management burden of hands-on monitoring, enabling you to focus on other areas that drive value.

MSPs that can boost customer productivity by ensuring Microsoft Teams remains reliable, frictionless, and seamless without increasing operational burden have a golden opportunity. They are well-positioned to drive revenue, boost margins, unlock new service offerings, and cement customer loyalty.

Having the capabilities of Martello’s Vantage DX as part of their managed service offering will help capitalize on this opportunity for growth.