Helping MSPs Ensure Customer Delight — A Story in Updates

It is no surprise that the Managed Services business is one of the most competitive trades out there. And we’d be extremely wrong to say that things are turning toward the better after a period of prolonged turbulence during the global pandemic.

From razor-thin margins to high customer acquisition costs and low-lifetime value, MSPs face challenges aplenty. However, it’s not all doom and gloom as we at Centilytics understand the troubles of our MSP partners and are constantly working toward helping our partners achieve maximum customer delight. Because the solution to the above-mentioned problems faced by MSPs begins at ensuring their customers are always satisfied.

Here is how Centilytics is helping its MSP partners deliver value on top of services to their customers:

Helping Deliver a Better User Experience (January-February 2022)

View Major Changes: The first two months of the New Year saw us introducing the following changes to improve the user experience while a View is created:

• Enhanced widget selection while creating View using different filters.
• Ability to change the view attached to a user/customer: When a customer/user is assigned a new View, the preexisting Views attached to them can be removed.
• Bulk View Update for Users: The users can now update their Views in bulk and apply the Views for multiple users in one go.
• Merge multiple widgets into a single view: We have introduced widget merging for users wherein they can group widgets as per their choice and tweak the UI as per their needs.
• Deleting Views: Now, only issuing users can delete views for the receiving user. Ex. — If a View X is passed to User B by User A, only User A can delete the passed View(s).

Updates Focused at Ensuring MSPs Can Expand Their Offerings (March 2022)

Rolling out new features and offerings to customers is a huge challenge in itself. We saw the opportunity and decided to roll out an update that will help our partners integrate their offering on top of our solutions and list it out for their customers. The major update for March 2022 brought out the following features:

Widget Creation: We have introduced Dynamic Form Builder that allows customers to expand their service catalogue by creating their own widgets and adding their offerings on top of Centilytics. The Form Builder also allows the user to configure the functioning of the widget created. The custom widget can be placed anywhere in Centilytics with the help of Views. Additionally, it can also be passed to child customers, so that service can be requested by them. The form builder is divided into two parts:

• Create your widget: Using this feature, the user can define a widget’s attributes like Widget Name, Widget Description and Widget Fields using drag and drop functionality.
• Configure Request Mechanism: Using this feature, users can integrate the widget created with an ITSM platform. Here, users need to map the widget fields with the ITSM selected.

Widget Catalog: We have created an index page of all the widgets that a user has access to, along with displaying the full information of widgets on a single page. Users will now be able to view the widget data in Tabular and Kanban formats, as well as apply Filters to view specific widgets. Additionally, have also introduced a new feature “Tag”, which will ensure users can apply tags on the widgets, helping them maintain custom distinction between various widgets. Users can also preview and even go to the desired widget from this page.

Widget Documentation-CMS: With this feature, users can add documentation corresponding to their custom widget. The documentation can include a variety of data types such as, videos, images, markdown rules, etc. It can be used by customers to add detailed information about a service offering. This documentation makes the usage of widget easier for users.

Nth Level Tenancy: Currently, the accounts attached to the partner can only be passed to one level ahead. With this new feature, Partners can now pass on the accounts up to 4 levels.

Boosting Customer Management for Our Partners (April 2022)

CAC Revamp: Flexibility is something that’s always welcome when our partners are managing a large customer base. Hence, we introduced the following changes to improve user experience while creating and managing a customer:

• Report: Users can now download a customer catalog report.
• Domain Restriction: This helps in restricting user onboarding to the domain used for creating the customer.
• Bulk Operations: Users can now perform bulk operations such as Bulk Delete, Bulk Suspend, Bulk Resume, Adding Tags.
• Tag Capability: This allows users to tag their customers.

New and Custom Features at The Click of a Few Buttons (June 2022)

A new month, a new major update. Self-service solutions are a large part of how our partners deliver solutions to their customer base. Taking it into account, we brought out a top-requested feature and some whitelabeling changes:

Query Builder: We have introduced a Query Builder that allows end users to create cost monitoring widgets for any cloud and its services, through a simple drag and drop interface. Thus ensuring 360° visibility into the cost of all their cloud services. Users will also be able to create SQL queries using the Query Builder’s graphical interface instead of manual SQL coding. Our Query Builder has also made it easy for users to search and filter database columns, create relationships between columns, view query results, and save queries even if they have no SQL experience. Some of the features are as follows.

• Custom Query Creation: Users can now define the columns that should be plotted on the UI and define the names of the columns based on their needs.
• Report Configuration: Users can define the report format that needs to be enabled on the widget.
• Users can also configure the variables for plotting of data graphs.

Whitelabeling Revamp: Amid the revamps of many features, we have also Fdiimproved the user experience for white labelling. Further, we have also added some new features that ensure users can customize the look and feel of Atlas.

Did We Say Even More Features Without Code? Yes, We Did. (July 2022)

Terraform Builder: This will facilitate creation of custom widgets, enabling end users to deploy cloud infrastructures in a single click using Terraform Scripts. Users will also be able to pass on the created widgets to their sub-users with the help of ACL & Views via these processes:

• Widget creation: Create a widget that can be passed to users to deploy resources with one click using Terraform.
• Widget requests: Request to deploy the runbook using the widget created in the above point.

Months go by and incremental changes pile-up. Sometimes, taking a holistic look helps all of us realize how much Centilytics’ offerings for MSP partners have evolved. With this new format, we aim at highlighting the journey of our offerings for our partners. Watch out for future updates as we help our valuable partners blaze the trail in MSP industry!