FPC Program ideas/suggestions

After a partner accepts the customer referral, a "Notice of FastTrack Assignment" email is sent to customer that has the partner's name, email address and domain name.

 

Please add a statement in the Notice of FastTrack Assignment email to include the partner's domain name to the customer's Safe Sender list or Allow list.

This will prevent the email sent from the partner to the customer from being quarantined or delivered into the customer's Junk folder and thus the customer never sees the email.

 

I have several customer not receive my emails and had to get my FRM involved to contact either the Microsoft account member of customer to add my email to their Allow list.

 

With heightened email security, some customer email systems are filtering emails and mistakenly being flagged as spam or phishing.

Active user consumption control rules (MAU) that end up creating difficulties for us to work with customers. Unfortunately, due to various situations that are beyond our control, many customers reduce their consumption or even stop using the solutions. The problem is that we have had big problems with this, as our numbers end up being hugely negative.

This ends up creating difficulties for us to remain active in Microsoft programs.

We've found that obtaining an "acceptable" signature is getting increasingly more difficult, to the point where the approval team in Partner Center does not accept DocuSigned SOWs. Understand needing to verify customer signature, but it's become a lot harder to find an acceptable method, and we have to go back and add additional verification (email where customer sends back signed SOW), which is not realistic for the team to go back and find with a large network of sellers. Curious to see if other partners are running into this issue, and if there's a potential for some flexibility on what's accepted as a "valid signature" when claiming? 

Team, up unitl i think the beginning of 2023, we were able to delivery PIE security everywhere engagements... we are an M365 partner with 5 badges, security being one of them.. but that doesnt seem to matter for the security everywher program as you now have to be an MSSP to delivery that engagement.

 

We find that a bit ridiculous in that we are always helping clients move to e5, EMS, etc.. and have built a team around that... we are a Professional Services company and an SI (as well as a CSP), but we are in the business of implementation and integration, not the types of services provided by an MSSP. 

 

our M365 clients rely on us to help them make decisions around upgrading, replaceing competitive products, etc.. and they dont think they should have to pay for that as they consider it microsoft presales work... but now i cant accomodate those types of engagement sfor them... 

we need to be able to!

 

we ahve been doing business with one of our clients, an over 60000 person organization, and had been their DPOR even back in the day.  Recenlty, another parnter must be doing some work in there for someone, and submitted a CPOR claim for SharePoint and Teams. 

 

Since we have been working with them since Moss 2007, we  have not been submitting new claims wevery time we got a new project with them; but, when another partner submitted a claim the client was reassigned to them... without anyone asking us or the client what their preference was...  we work directly with the collaboration team at the client, and they had no idea who else may have submitted anyhing, but likely just a dpeartment with whom they were doing some work.

 

when a partner submits a cliam and anothere parnter is already on the claim, there should be some kind of discussion between the microsoft program team and the two partners before just arbitrailiy making the siwtch

 

There is no discernible protection for a partner after you provide the benefit. If we execute a justification exercise for SCI, or migrating to Teams or Intune, we should be able to maintain the customer association for a period of time. We are being usurped by LARs as the Partner Center criteria for picking between contested associations is a mystery and decided by uneducated, non-Microsoft employees. Partner Support is terrible, staffed by a team that has no clue what they are doing or how partners need Partner Center.

We have not seen a single referral to us that had an incentive behind it in our 2 years with the program. We have only had one non-customer referral that actually responded to our reply and despite being told by FastTrack that the educational institution was indeed eligible for partner incentive (we asked because we knew they were not), we found out after executing the benefit that no incentive would be paid. For the referrals coming from existing customers, it is obvious that Microsoft Sales teams (or CSAs in particular) just point everything to FastTrack partner for free work even when situations are clearly not FastTrack eligible. Microsoft is burdening partners since their technical teams continue to be less and less useful. The FastTrack team seems to be co-conspirators in this operation and seem to not want to protect their partners any more than the balance of the Microsoft program. 

in Partner Center logo Builder, Partner can have an official Statement to distribute their capabilities and current Available program they enrollment/partner competency, adding FastTrack Ready partner capabilities letter may support some partners in future need