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, maybe complex data migrations and customisations to take care of. Such projects are managed by service companies who specialise in these services. Frappe has an official partner model that helps these companies gain visibility and transfers learning and best practices that 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. And 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 like, did we respond to the customer on time can be measured without any external feedback, but the was the response useful can only be measured by actively asking the customer. Once we have feedback, we need to go back and fix the process. Sometimes it means better training, sometimes it means setting correct expectations, sometimes it means being more organised in how work is done.
The PMM essentially ensures that customers get great service again and again.
What can customers expect
The model guarantees that a customer gets the right services and your feedback is valuable to the partner. A mature partner 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 have been given a “standard operating procedure” based on our experience and we expect partner to have their process manuals and evidences that they are following processes. Our partner success team will usually visit the partner at least once a year or get on calls. Based on the evidences of process compliance, dashboards and list of improvements, we will give 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 is not just something we have invented, we take customer feedback very seriously at Frappe as well. This is why we know it works! We measure our outcomes like uptime and error rates and support SLAs with deep conviction. And this is why we know this model works. It took us a while to become more organised around customer feedback, but we hope we can do it faster from Frappe Partners.
Read about our vision
Updated April 15, 2023