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How much does Dynamics 365 support cost?

If you want support for your Dynamics solution and you’re wondering what the price will be, the answer is that it depends what you are looking for! Inciper is known in the market for a flexible service catalogue and a willingness to adapt our offering. We want to ensure that all our customers get the maximum benefit from their Dynamics 365 support

In this blog, we look at four factors that will impact the cost of the service you receive, it is up to you and your business to decide which parts of this are important to you.

 

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Service level agreement – response or resolution?

Service level agreement is a core element of any managed services conversation and a key contributor to Dynamics support pricing. When you get in contact, we will commit to a timed outcome based on the severity of the incident, with SLAs falling into two categories:

  • A response SLA defines how soon we will get in contact;
  • A resolution SLA defines the timeframe in which we will find an answer to your issue. 

This means that a resolution SLA will cost more because it gives certainty on the timeline. The key element to consider here is how often you will be logging calls that must be resolved within a certain timeframe. If there is flexibility about this and D365 is a system of support, a response SLA is probably right for you. If your Dynamics solution is the core system on which your business runs, then you should be looking at a resolution SLA.

 

Internal capability – what do you need us for?

A typical support organisation is based around the following structure:

 

  • 1st line answering the phone; 
  • 2nd line doing basic break/fix; 
  • 3rd line providing expert guidance; and 
  • 4th line being the solution authors such as Microsoft in the case of Dynamics. 

 

All of the above will be overseen by a service delivery manager to coordinate the effort and usually a service desk manager to manage problems and change. 

Your business needs to decide which level of support they are willing to provide through internal investment and which the support partner will provide. Simply put, the more that you push to an external provider, the higher the Dynamics 365 support pricing.

In our experience, clients will almost always have an internal function that provides a ‘first port of call’ for any Dynamics incident – this could be a dedicated 1st line support in the IT department. Alternatively, it could be a recognised pool of process leads that know the system well enough to decide if the incident is a case of user error.

The Dynamics support partner will either provide both 2nd and 3rd line support or just 3rd line. At Inciper, we work with clients in all these situations and are flexible around our level of involvement to fit with your needs.

 

Call off – moving beyond incidents

So far, most of the Dynamics support pricing considerations have been about incident management, sometimes called break/fix. However, at Inciper we know that you don’t just want to keep your system running, you want to call on other services as well. For example, you may want to request training on credit collection, or you may want new fields added to a record to flow through to your reporting system. 

The ability to call on these capabilities is a natural extension of having our functional and technical expertise as a part of your support organisation. We offer a flexible ‘call off’ system which gives you an agreed number of hours a month which you can use to request these services. This time allocation can either reset each month or roll over to the next. Once your hours have run out, you can always buy another bundle of time if there is more that you want to achieve.

 

Continuous enhancement – keeping you at the forefront

The Microsoft Dynamics solution is described as ‘evergreen’, meaning that the regular updates always keep it current. Beyond this, the wider Microsoft business applications suite is always expanding, including the Power Platform, Power BI, RPA and machine learning capabilities. Furthermore, an ecosystem of third-party add-ons can provide niche capabilities to your solution. It can be difficult to keep informed on these new features and to identify which will be a business advantage for your organisation.

You can choose to include continuous enhancement in your support package, which will impact on the Dynamics support pricing. In this case, one of our solution architects will spend the time to understand your business so that we can regularly review the solution landscape and identify whether any components will bring you measurable benefit. We can then also manage and support the implementation of the new feature into your business, should you wish.

 

Pricing summary

There are many factors involved in Dynamics 365 support pricing. It doesn’t need to be complex though, and a short conversation can usually get to the bottom of exactly how Inciper can help your business with Dynamics 365 support. Our flexibility means that we can work with you to come up with a package of services that meets your business needs at a price which is appropriate to your budget.

Inciper provides an ITIL compliant full-service management capability across Microsoft Business Solutions – Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain; Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement; Dynamics AX; Dynamics CRM; Data and Analytics (PowerBI) and the Power Platform. We are experts in managing solutions delivered by other Dynamics partners.

 

Does this sound like the type of Microsoft Dynamics partner you’re looking for? Click the button below to download our Managed Services Catalogue and find out more about the services we offer:

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Inciper Managed Services Catalogue

Our Managed Services Catalogue gives you insight into what we at Inciper offer as part of our comprehensive Microsoft support packages.

 

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Inciper managed services catalogue