While Pax8’s MSPs give them good reviews on the interface of the distributor’s marketplace, the drive to improve the customer experience has led to enhancements around ordering speed, search, and granularity around user-based billing.
Pax8’s Ryan Walsh (L) with Jason Bystrak of D&H at their ChannelCon breakout session
LAS VEGAS – Cloud distributor Pax8 has added some new feature functionality to their marketplace and made some enhancements to improve the experience for their MSP customers. Ryan Walsh, Pax8’s chief channel officer, discussed the changes with ChannelBuzz at the CompTIA ChannelCom event here, where Pax8 has a booth and Walsh co-hosted a breakout session on the buyer’s journey.
The tech buyer’s journey was originally laid out last year by CompTIA Industry Advisory Councils, and this year they supplemented it with more detail about each step, how things have changed from the last, and what all elements of the IT supply chain need to do to adjust.
“The new data that CompTIA released about the buyer’s experience indicates that more and more companies – 88 per cent – view the customer experience as their core differentiator,” Walsh said. “We embrace that because we know that while others can sell the same products that we sell, and could copy our marketing, it’s much harder to copy the experience we are creating for our partners.”
Walsh said that while feedback from MSPs on working with the Pax8 marketplace has been positive, improvements could still be made.
“We focused on simplifying and improving the user interface – the OmniDash portal,” Walsh said. “It’s the one place to access all the information that we have. We improved the user’s ability to search for customers’ products and subscriptions. Now the contextual search, which was previously mainly on the single pane screen, is now put through the whole application. The result is to provide the fullest visibility with the fewest key strokes.”
Another major priority was increasing the marketplace’s order processing speed.
“We have had over 60 releases since January, in what is now a very agile development process,” Walsh indicated. “We have increased the speed by which we process orders by 500 per cent compared to 2018. That translates into a product being processed in 5-10 seconds today.”
Another enhancement has been improved integration capability with Synchro, a newer player in the market who make a combined PSA/RMM tool that also provides remote access.
“We have improved our integration into the Synchro PSA tool,” Walsh said. “Their message to the market is that they are a new player who deliberately set out to build a better mousetrap for MSPs, not one that has been evolved over time. They have a strong development capability, and our engineers particularly liked working with them when we do our integrations.”
Finally, improvements have been made to usage-based billing and visibility to provide partners with more specific granularity down to the specific product.
“For example, Webroot and Proofpoint both have sub-product details that are more difficult to get with a usage-based model,” Walsh said. “We can now give MSP the granularity they need.”
