Change Licensing & Renewals (L&R) name to better reflect the work
Overview
In my opinion, the name Licensing & Renewals (L&R) no longer reflects the scope of the work that we do.
Licensing: a license is relevant for a self-managed subscription only. This term is excluding SaaS subscriptions, which now make up almost half of our ticket volume. This term also propagates the incorrect notion that a SaaS subscription needs a license. People are often referring to a "Bronze/Silver/Gold license" and setting the expectation with customers to expect a license when they purchase a SaaS subscription. This is very confusing for customers and it can impact the time it takes for support folks to troubleshoot as they first have to figure out whether the person is talking about SaaS or self-managed
Renewals: while the broad category of renewals
is a part of the requests and queries that we handle, the term still excludes all other requests and queries that are not about a renewal specifically. It may mislead someone to think we don't look at new customers, cancellations, purchasing errors and questions, upgrades, customers portal actions, license troubleshooting, etc.
I feel that because the naming doesn't describe what we actually do, the queue could become a "catch-all" for all things that don't seem technical enough for other queues. (Perhaps that is what the queue should be, but this has never been defined or decided as such).
The naming is important because I am noticing that tickets that I personally don't classify as L&R, ends up in our queue. It is especially difficult to draw the line for SaaS subscriptions. How do we categorise a ticket about CI minutes, for example? Why are plan change requests in the domain of L&R, what makes it L&R and not a SaaS request? I am not saying it's wrong, but I sometimes find it hard to draw the line for the L&R box vs the SaaS box, which means that we take on the work anyway and our scope grows.
Goal
The goal of this issue is to think about better defining the scope of L&R work and picking a name that accurately describes that scope.
I believe scope is important as new products may be introduced (like Storage) and we should be clear on how and when the new features add to the work of the queue. Should we decide that the scope covers all products that fulfilment touches, then the naming should reflect it.
Suggestions
Here are some potential options - I have not yet found a name that fits the work perfectly.
- Subscriptions (most of our customers are existing or prospects looking to purchase a subscription. This term does exclude CI minutes or other add on products that are not strictly classified as subscriptions)
- Subscriptions and Purchasing (purchasing for non-subscription products are included, but can still be seen as excluding non-purchasing queries for non-subscription products)
- Purchasing and Provisioning (aligns with product structure naming, but can cause confusion. Also, we may not want to support all the work that comes from this group, perhaps we exclude trials or certain products)
Suggestions from comments:
- Subscriptions, Licensing and Renewals
- Technical Sales Support
- Subscription management
- Subscription and account management
- Fulfillment Support
- Technical Fulfillment Support