Don’t Underestimate the Value of Your Clients’ VIPs

Every organization has VIPs priority stakeholders who need to be kept happy because so much is riding on what they do. They may be the execs who run the business, or customers and partners representing key relationships. Their time is precious and efficiency matters to them, so avoiding downtime and providing frictionless digital experiences is crucial.

When it comes to solutions like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, many organizations lack the knowledge and tools to provide that kind of proactive support. Anything you can do as an MSP to fill those gaps and deliver VIP IT care will have high value.

Four keys to successful VIP support

Since the goal is a frictionless digital experience, your clients need to trust that you can prevent as many problems as possible from affecting VIP users, and that you can respond and resolve issues immediately when they do occur. Classic reactive support won’t cut it. What you need instead are four things:

• The ability to identify VIP users
• Continuous proactive monitoring and alerts
• End-to-end visibility of the entire Microsoft ecosystem
• Trend analysis and optimization capabilities

Each of these supports the others to enable holistic oversight and control of your clients’ Microsoft environments. Let’s look at each one a little more closely.

Identifying VIP users

Since VIPs have higher performance requirements than other users, you need to be able to monitor them as a group. That requires a regularly updated list of VIPs and a toolset that can slice and dice user data according to that categorization. This lets you check in as often as you need on the performance levels VIPs are experiencing.

Continuous proactive monitoring and alerts

The next ‘must-have’ is the ability to see what’s going on with Teams and Microsoft 365 at all times, confirming that the IT environment is meeting the parameters you know are critical for peak performance. If thresholds are crossed, you need to be alerted right away, with prioritization of VIP-affecting issues. Ideally that prioritization would be automatic to speed up your response time and reduce the amount of on-the-fly thinking you need to do.

It’s one thing to know when problems have happened  even if it’s before users feel the impact but to truly get ahead of them requires proactive synthetic testing. With synthetic testing, you can automate actions like launching Teams calls or downloading OneDrive files and see what would happen if a real user was doing the same thing in that moment. This exposes issues without users present so you can fix them before anyone knows.

End-to-end visibility of the Microsoft ecosystem

Microsoft provides tools to monitor and report on the parts of the IT environment that it has control over, including the data center and user endpoints. But end-to-end visibility also includes the local network and your client’s ISP network. Connecting all the dots with network path tracing and seeing them in one dashboard view that incorporates the native Microsoft data and other inputs provides the full visibility needed to identify root causes faster and with greater confidence.

Trend analysis and optimization

The last requirement for proactive VIP IT care is seeing the bigger picture: identifying trends so that you can recognize problematic conditions sooner and intervene earlier to keep improving Teams and Microsoft 365 performance over time. Because your clients will no doubt want to establish SLAs with you, you’ll need the data to prove you’re upholding them. For that you need a tool that can generate metrics and insights and do the trend analysis required for you to make your case.

Vantage DX does it all

As the only solution purpose-built to monitor and manage Microsoft 365 and Teams, Martello Vantage DX is specifically designed to provide all of these capabilities. It enables proactive monitoring with synthetic testing to find issues without user involvement. You can set the alerts that make sense for your needs and your clients’ business requirements, with an end-to-end view of the entire environment from VIP user devices to the Microsoft data center. And Vantage DX supports a range of analytics to spot patterns and trends.

With Martello by your side, you can be a powerful partner in delivering VIP value to clients who depend on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.