FPC Program Ideas/Suggestions

Dear all,

In order to claim a customer workload, we submit the POE after getting customer signature. The POE approval from CPOR team comes within 4 to 5 business days. But the Problem we are facing is that once the CPOR POE is accepted, it takes 3 to 4 business days to reflect in FRP PowerBI dashboard and it takes more than 10 plus days (sometimes even more days) to reflect in the CPOR dashboard with usage. 

 

It would be great if we could select multiple workloads when we raise a customer association claim request in Partner Center. Currently there's a cap at 4 workloads, meaning that sometimes we need to raise up to 4 claim requests for just 1 customer. This is quite time consuming. 

Having a search bar on the customer associations tab on Partner Center can really help the FRPs search submitted claims by - claim ID/ customer domain name. Currently the only way to retrieve a past claim details is to export the entire claims record. Through this search bar, we as a FRP, can get more granular with our search for a particular claim.

Currently, there is no visibility on Partner Center for the date on which a particular incentive milestone was achieved for any particular workload. It only shows as 'Reached' if a particular workload hits the incentive milestone. Can a feature be added where it provides the FRPs with visibility into the date of milestone fulfillment? This we greatly help in tracking of expected payouts in monthly invoices and provide clarity before rushing off to raise a dispute.

More and more, we are finding that customers don't want to register or associate a different partner for a CPOR workload. Too often it is controversial, or another partner (LAR) might have a deal to have them all associated with them, or there might have been another partner that "also" had a role driving MAU and they don't want to switch. 

The net effect is that we aren't getting proper attribution for our role driving adoption and our monthly/quarterly/annual performance looks underwhelming. This also impacts how we are rewarded through the incentive model and can negatively impact how we are graded from a compliance standpoint. This may not be impacting all partners, but at last count we've only been able to register 1/20 engagements in the last 3-4 months where technically we are driving adoption or advancing the cause! In my experience, the friction is real and causing the whole CPOR registration to not work for us. 

I have a few suggestions to consider:
1. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the business rule that only one partner can be associated to a workload. What if by design, rather than by exception, multiple partners could be assigned to a workload? That would remove some of the friction that customers face accepting a new request.

2. What if there was a simpler way to confirm a partner is engaged? Currently, we need to either have a customer sign a document or we need to submit a signed SOW as POE. As a partner, we often don't feel comfortable submitting an entire SOW as it contains a lot of detail that is under NDA.

Secondly, we worry that if we just submitted the SOW without first talking to the customer, they would be upset receiving the email notification from Microsoft as it is confusing and possibly triggers the multi-partner association issue. Instead of it being a "notification of partner association", perhaps it could be reworded to "Confirmation of Partner Engagement" and the language could say, "Congratulations, we understand you have retained the support of <partner name> and in your work together you may be driving the adoption of the following areas: <list the areas> 
To support your work together, we will provide limited adoption data of these workloads with your partner. If you would prefer not to disclose this data, or have the partner associated in our records as providing support, please click here. Otherwise, nothing is required in response.  

3. Another great option would be for Microsoft CSM or Modern Workplace Specialist to be allowed to "vouch" for our engagement. Perhaps the partner could request someone on the Account Team to confirm that the partner is engaged and is driving adoption/MAU. 

4. I'd recommend that any MCAP POE count as CPOR POE for key workloads that relate to the engagement. We've had many MCAP engagements that were influential at moving a customer forward, but for various reasons we weren't able to get associated to that customer for the workloads in question. 
 

Dear all,

There are lot of issues faced by us with CPOR Incentive Team. As we know that the usage percentage is calculated different between FTOP vs CPOR and Microsoft is working to integrate both,  but we have been working on a multiple cases (for the past 2 months) asking for valid claim for the workload that we have completed with the customer, still we haven't got the right response from the team. 

Our Asks/Feedback:

1) Once the Case has been dragged to more than a week, CPOR Incentive team can set up a joint call with Partner to understand the issue in a better way to handle and help
2) We Partners wanted to know which backend data that CPOR team is referring to and the Team should know how FRP works as well. 
 

When opening a case we are required to enter a lot of redundant data that already exists in the system, like: chose program, enter MPN ID, enter claim ID, customer tenant ID, workload etc. and also our contact details. All this information is time consuming and could be automatically populated if a specific start a dispute or clarification button would be available at that specific Workload line in Partner Center.

Additional small remarks:
1. when the case is generated has the name "Case 5-0000xxxxxx has been opened for your request" instead of the issue or claim id that would help easier identify the emails. It would be useful if the case name would also be generated automatically or contain the problem summary
2. if an incentive has been payed it would be easier if it would be listed as payed or earned at workload level with the respective earned amount so that we do not need to open a case just to find out this has been calculated. It would also help track all past earnings at customer level. The orange vs blue color that appears now only indicates if milestone was reached and not that we met program terms (ie. if it was reached and we claimed at 30% or 50% I think it shows the same as if we would have claimed it at 5%)

Thank you!

Data health seems to be affected when usage drops even after a milestone has been reached (perhaps client purchased more entitlements). It would be nice if this could be controlled in some way. 

Example: recently a client was on track and had passed 15% milestone, but then purchased an additional ~200 entitlements which dropped the usage percentage. Its not easy to see if/when they had hit that milestone, and now it remains as additional work in data health. 

When a FT referral email is sent to the FRP it would be helpful to have the tenant name included.  Since referral emails are allowed as the initial PoE documentation for submitting the CPOR requests, having the the tenant name would speed up the process.  This also helps when the customer does not know what their tenant name is and/or does not know what their default domain is (which happens way too frequently).  
I propose a table in the email that could look something like this:

FTOP record name	Contoso US
Tenant ID	2k1wi-2cats-3d0gs-24kgld-12blah
Tenant name	contosousa.onmicrosoft.com
Customer PoC	Jo Smith (jo.smith@contoso.com

This would be in addition to what is already in the email body.
If emailing this information is a concern then please instruct the Gateway team in adding this information in the OSNs in FTOP.
Any time we can get this information up front would be extremely helpful.

In coming period, MSFT will migrate from FTOP to Partner Center (OSU-M365).
It would be very helpfull if MSFT could share then API Framework (or future enhancements) to partners so they can integrate their internal systems.
If it would be possible to have a 2-way API that would even be super (for downloading and uploading relevant data).