Dicker Data introduces new online Microsoft End User Portal to save you time and money

As the world becomes increasingly online and digital, speed and quality customer experience (UX) is key to gaining competitive advantage. Interestingly, the self-service economy is one of the fastest growing areas of UX and according to Forrester, 70 percent of customers prefer to use online portals or websites to access services, make purchases or get answers to their questions rather than direct phone or email.

Accenture suggested by adding self-service, a typical utility could see $1-3 million in annual savings. To handle this demand, 91 percent of organisations plan to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the next three years according to Gartner.

With this in mind and always on the front foot, leading value-added distributor of hardware, software, cloud, and emerging technologies, Dicker Data is empowering partners and their customers with the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) End User Portal. As an award-winning Microsoft distributor in APAC, Dicker Data’s portal is a cutting-edge offering branded as a partner’s very own solution where for their end customers can view, provision and self-manage Microsoft licenses and Azure Cloud consumption. This means Dicker Data partners are freed from administrative purchase orders and have more time to focus on delivering value added services and enhancing other parts of their business development.

Ian Welch, CIO and Director of Operations at Dicker Data said “From working with over 6,900 resellers we are seeing a transition to customers demanding self-service solutions for purchasing. Today, transactions are evolving from traditional capital expenditures (CAPEX) to operating expenses (OPEX) by adopting subscription-based services. In response to this, the Dicker Data End User Portal is enabling the ability to self-manage Microsoft licensing, an instant scale up and scale down solution that customers can use to cater for evolving team structures and user demand.”

What does the End User Portal offer Dicker Data partners?

From bricks and mortar to the online world, the End User Portal is a white-labelled solution that enables 24/7 instant on and instant off control for partners and their customers by allowing them to self-manage Microsoft CSP licenses on-demand.

For Dicker Data partners, the portal can be customised with company, logos, colour scheme and contact details and thereby branded to their customers as their own service offering. Leveraging the portal, partners can address market demands, enhance UX and empower their customers with a self-service option to completely manage licensing. Partners can selectively show or hide retail pricing, enable or disable purchasing of new subscriptions and receive notifications of customer activity. By empowering end user customers with a next-generation and low-effort portal to instantly access and control their own Microsoft licensing, partners have less admin and therefore more time to focus on adding value to customers and accelerating business growth.

By building the backend platform for partners to leverage, all Dicker Data partners whether small, medium or large enterprises are now empowered to offer a complete dynamic experience to their customers with 24/7 access and equal opportunity to compete in the market without the need to build or invest their own licensing portal.

What about the benefits for customers? 

From an end user customer perspective, they are instantly empowered to manage and provision licensing through the white-labelled Dicker Data CSP Portal. End-users have access to their own tenancy with the ability to completely manage, purchase and turn-off licensing for their business. Access to the portal is via their existing Windows username and password and from here customers can securely sign into their own

Microsoft Office 365 admin centre or into the Azure portal to manage their own account.
Key to the Microsoft CSP experience is the ability to instantly scale up and scale down based on user demand.

A customer’s reseller partner can customise the portal with granular access points enabling customers to log in to the site to view status of licensing with the option to add or cancel subscription at the customer’s own liability.

Ian Welch said, “Rather than our partners taking three or four days to get through a long list of purchase orders, their customers have instant access. It will now take less than 5 minutes to get licensing instantly provisioned for new users or cancelled for past users. The system is built to instantly scale without involving an IT consultant.”

Alternatively, partners can tailor the portal to request transactions to be made by customers only by consulting their CSP partner/IT provider.

Ready to empower your customers?

Dicker Data Microsoft CSP experts are available for any advice, questions, and demonstrations via csp.support@dickerdata.com. Learn more about the end user portal and download a walk through guide here. 

Sample Log In - Screenshot's from the End User Portal: