Use metrics in Partner Center to increase adoption and satisfaction

  • Article

Appropriate roles: Global admin | User management admin | Admin agent | Sales agent

Our partners use many metrics to gauge whether their business is growing and where to focus investment. Partner Center can help by providing data about if and how your customers are using the licenses that they've purchased. This information is available for Office products (including OneDrive for Business, which is counted together with SharePoint).

You can see data for all of your customers through the Cloud Solution Provider program. Some customers might buy licenses from other partners or directly from Microsoft. For these situations, you can see the total licenses across all partners. To see only your own licenses, go to the customer's subscriptions instead.

Note

Currently, we only show data for Office 365 and Dynamics 365. We'll be enabling data for additional products in the future.

Find license and user data

You can find license and user data for a single customer or across your portfolio.

Find license and user data for a single customer

Use the following steps to get license and user data.

  1. Sign in to Partner Center dashboard and select Customers.

  2. Select a specific customer.

  3. Select Customer insights.

Find license and user data across your portfolio

You can also get insights into your license and user data.

  1. Sign in to Partner Center and select Insights.

  2. Select any of the analytics options.

  3. To download deployment and usage data across your entire customer set, select the export (down-arrow) option.

Terminology

  • Entitlement = a license that the user is entitled to use (it isn't suspended for fraud or non-payment, it hasn't been upgraded to a different license, it hasn't been canceled by the user, or another issue).

  • Active = if the subscribed user has used the entitlement for a task in the last 28 calendar days.

  • Deployment % = assigned licenses/sold licenses

  • Usage % = active users/total users

    Sometimes the usage % is inflated, or greater than 100%. This issue can happen for several reasons:

    • If the customer had employee turnover and the license was transferred to a new user.

    • If the customer has two subscriptions for a SKU, but one is in the grace period, disabled, or deprovisioned, entitlements in both subscriptions might register active usage during the 28-day period, but only one is counted in the total.

    • If the customer has a trial subscription, activity is counted, but the subscription isn't counted towards the total entitlements.

    • If some customers are using Yammer more than they're entitled to by their license, it can skew the data dramatically.

Offering training

If you're fielding many Help and How-to questions, the adoption numbers on your account are low, or you're looking for up-sell opportunities, you might want to consider offering training courses. By teaching your customers how to better use the cloud solution software they've purchased, you're more likely to see an increase in productivity and satisfaction, and a decrease in support needs.

Improving customer adoption and usage

  • Problem: The user adoption rate is low, and many licenses aren't being used.

  • What to consider: Customers might not understand the value that the software could provide. They need help with envisioning the ways they could incorporate it into their day to simplify tasks that they're already doing, or to enable new kinds of productivity.

  • What to try: Case studies, user testimonials about specific scenarios, tutorial blogs, or videos.

  • Problem: There's a high volume of support calls for help and how-to questions.

  • What to consider: Customers might be new to the software, to the product version, or to their task.

  • What to try: You can use a dual strategy of offering training (in person or online) to increase customers' overall expertise, while also promoting some of the self-service options available to customers.

You might want to update your support site to include the self-service options described in Customer support in addition to your support contact information.