Frappe Partners
Process Maturity Model
How we ensure customers get quality services from Frappe Partners
What is process maturity?
Frappe products like ERPNext are hard to self-implement. There are accounting and compliance configurations, and even complex data migrations and customisations to take care of. Such projects are managed by service companies who specialise in these processes. Frappe has an official partner model that helps these companies gain visibility and enables them to learn best practices to ensure customer satisfaction.
The Process Maturity Model (PMM) is a set of best practices that we expect all Frappe Partners to follow. This ensures that customers get great services and partners are able to build sustainable business models. By ensuring quality across the ecosystem, the entire community stands to benefit.
Providing assurance
The PMM is based on standard practices to manage quality. Quality roughly means customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is measured right from the first interaction to after-sales service. The heart of a good quality system is feedback.
Feedback can be both explicit and implicit. Things such as customer response time can be measured without any external feedback, but whether the response was useful or not can only be measured by actively asking the customer. Once we have feedback, we need to go back and fix any issues. Sometimes this means better training, or setting better expectations, or sometimes it can mean being more organised about how work is done.
The PMM essentially ensures that customers experience consistently great service.
What can customers expect
The Partner Maturity Model guarantees that customer gets exceptional services and give feedback on those services. A partner with a high maturity level will do the following:
Give quality responses to sales queries on time.
Make a project plan, share it with the customer and regularly monitor milestones.
Track post implementation issues on a ticketing system.
Ask for feedback and improve their processes.
The levels
The model has five stages based on the process maturity of the partner
Level 1: Partner is not product certified.
Level 2: Partner is certified, but does not have stable processes like CRM, support, project management, or it is very ad-hoc.
Level 3: Partner has stable processes but does not measure outcomes or track things like feedback or SLA.
Level 4: Partner is stable and measures outcomes and feedback, but does not act on it.
Level 5: The partner regularly tracks the outcomes and acts on it by fixing their processes.
Evaluation
All partners are given a “standard operating procedure” based on our experience and we expect partners to integrate these processes and have evidence of its success. Our partner success team will usually visit the partner at least once a year or get on regular calls. Based on the evidences of process compliance, dashboards and list of improvements, the partner manager will assign a PMM rating.
If our auditors find non-compliance, they will raise it to the partner and then the partner can request follow-up audits. You can read Pushkar Joshi's blog sharing his experience here.
We do it ourselves
This process is not just for partners, even internally, Frappe takes feedback very seriously. We measure outcomes like uptime and error rates and support SLAs with deep conviction. Which is why we know this model works and want to help implement it even more effectively for our partners as well.
Read about our vision
Updated April 15, 2023