Automated upsell opportunity detection for cloud and communication services with Nextian

Cloud and communications subscription services such as internet access, hosted servers or storage have a life span often measured in years.

Once sales reps close a sale and service is up and running, account managers usually have limited visibility into service performance and potential upsell and cross sell opportunities.

This leads to:

Missed revenues: upselling is possible, but account management does not know about potential opportunities; the customer may even be researching other options because “the product is not working well”

Poor customer experience: problems are addressed when they are happening, rather than proactively (i.e., “with this increase of storage, you’re going to run out of it in 2-6 months’ time”); even though it’s not technically provider’s fault, it still can have a negative impact on customer experience

Providers solve this by tasking their engineering support teams with providing information to account managers (e.g., bandwidth utilization reports in case of Internet Service Providers). Typically, this does not work well, as support teams are busy with support and treat requests to help sales as a distraction.

Nextian solves the problem in a systematic, “zero-touch” way without creating additional overhead for support teams.

Monitoring systems overview

Monitoring systems are traditionally referred to as NMS (Network Monitoring Systems) for networks, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring) for software.

RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) is a term often used interchangeably with NMS in the context of service providers.

Observability is a new term for deep-dive monitoring and analytics of software performance, especially in conjunction with DevOps.

A typical monitoring system has elements database (“nodes” or “elements”) that are passively and actively monitored.

Passive monitoring indicates that monitoring system listens for events from devices (e.g., SNMP traps, event logs, etc.), while active monitoring means that an element is queried for metrics (e.g., current CPU load, number of packets, SQL buffers, etc.).

Typically, multiple sensors can be configured for each node with different polling intervals, collected metrics, etc.

Monitoring systems give a detailed picture of individual elements with instant problem identification (outage, CPU overload, high network usage, too many SQL queries, etc.) and alarming.

Business perspective vs. monitoring perspective

The problem is that business sees things from a different perspective than monitoring systems. If an element is down, the business questions typically are:

• Which customers are affected?
• How much they spend with us?
• Which services?
• How much revenue is potentially at risk?

Similar, business questions also apply to performance metrics:

• How much average CPU justifies a conversation about an upgrade?
• What bandwidth utilization affects applications that are using them?

To make things even more complex, analyzing customer needs requires a broader perspective: one must understand what the service (product) is, which elements make up the service and impacts of elements’ metrics on overall service performance and user experience.

Answering business questions is impossible by looking at NMS/APM alone — this is where Nextian provides a solution.

What information is needed to detect an upgrade opportunity?

Detecting an upgrade opportunity requires analyzing both business and performance information:

Nextian upgrade analytics start from the service perspective (look at the service information first, then at elements and then come up with conclusions). This is different than the NMS/APM logic, which is focused on individual elements.

How does it work?

Nextian platform consists of several modules grouped into two packages:

Typically, Nextian RMM sources monitoring data from existing NMS/RMM/APM/Observability systems to ensure data consistency across the board.

Nextian RMM can also directly monitor and collect performance information using multiple protocols such as WMI, SNMP, SQL database queries and others, to provide additional monitoring capabilities:

The processing logic can be summarized as follows:

1. Collect usage data from applications, hosts, networks and other infrastructure
2. Run data through the analytics engine
3. Compare against sold-product data
4. Create actionable alarms and upgrade opportunities
5. Relay information to the Salesforce CRM so it is immediately visible to account managers

Select use cases

Which monitoring system to use?

Nextian RMM can obtain performance & availability information by direct monitoring or from other NMS/APM systems.

We recommend the latter approach, to keep data consistent. Two monitoring systems can report slightly different results (e.g., response times, alarm durations, availability, etc.) due to different probing times and intervals. Also, active monitoring of elements by two NMS systems in not desirable.

We recommend the latter approach, to keep data consistent. Two monitoring systems can report slightly different results (e.g., response times, alarm durations, availability, etc.) due to different probing times and intervals. Also, active monitoring of elements by two NMS systems in not desirable.

Conclusions

Automated discovery of upgrade opportunities increases revenues and improves customer experience by seamlessly bridging the gap between sales/account management and service monitoring.

Integrating monitoring systems and analytics with Salesforce helps account managers and sales reps to drive revenue with no overhead on the support teams.

Nextian is a vendor of Quote-to-Cash (QTC) software for cloud and communications helping providers accelerate growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you!