Frappe Partners
Process Maturity Model
How we ensure customers get quality services from Frappe Partners
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.
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.
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 model has five stages based on the process maturity of the partner.
Level 1: Partner is not product certified.
Level 2: Partner is certified and has defined processes for sales, implementation and support.
Level 3: Along with stable processes, the partner has control mechanisms to ensure that processes are followed in real time.
Level 4: Partner tracks measurable outcomes via dashboards and tracks corrective actions.
Level 5: The partner regularly tracks the outcomes and continuously improves processes by doing preventive fixes by small and big improvements.
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.
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.
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Updated April 15, 2023
