Business Systems: Portal Analysis, Integrations, and Flow

1. You are here:
2. Business Operations
3. Business Engagement Team
4. Business Systems: Portal Analysis, Integrations, and Flow

On this page

• Contact
• The Customer Portal
• Enterprise Application Ecosystem
  • EntApp Ecosystem
  • Team Boards
  • Relevant Repos
• Defined Technology Approach
  • Sales Operations
  • Product
  • Support
  • Business Operations
  • Finance Operations
  • Sales Systems
• High Level Setup
  • Some Documentation
  • Customer Flow
  • System Integrations
  • Zuora and Salesforce
    • Zuora details
    • Definitions
• Change Management
  • Adding new SKUs
  • SFDC Sandbox Refresh
• Definitions of users
  • Self-managed EE
  • Dotcom
  • Self-managed FOSS
• Related Documentation and Links: Licensing, Billing, Transactions
• Refunds
• Licensing and Renewals (L&R) Queue in Zendesk
• Notifications
  • Notification Emails

Contact

• Business Systems Analyst | Jamie Carey

• Product Manager, Fulfillment | Amanda Rueda

Growth Group	Request Type
Acquisition	new biz
Conversion	trials
Expansion	How do I?, upgrades
Fulfillment	purchasing issues/requests, customers portal usage, subscription management
Retention	renewal, getting started, license, user management

The Customer Portal

aka the portal, the customers' app, the subscription portal

The customer portal is a GitLab created and managed application: there are three related applications: customers.gitlab.com, version.gitlab.com, and license.gitlab.com.

Additionally, there are two other points of sale online: via the AWS marketplace and GOV.UK Digital Marketplace.

Enterprise Application Ecosystem

The customer portal integrates with many of our other tools. We use the label EntApp Ecosystem to alert other teams to what we are working on that could affect the data or operations of another team.

EntApp Ecosystem

• all issues with EntApp Ecosystem label
• gitlab-com-Sales
• gitlab-org-Eng by milestone
• gitlab-services
• gitlab-com-IT/Finance
• gitlab-data

Team Boards

• Sales Systems
• Growth Team

Relevant Repos

• Salesforce
• Zendesk
• Customers app
• Version app
• License app

Defined Technology Approach

Sales Operations

Directly Responsible Individual James Harrison

• Clear, consistent workflows for Sales to be trained on new business and renewals.
• Clear, consistent processes on how to get self-service support or Sales support.

Product

Directly Responsible Individuals Amanda Rueda and Michael Karampalas

• Customers and Sales to be provided with easy to read format of known bugs that are affecting the portal, what is the workaround, how to ask for the workaround to be applied to them, and what the timeline to fix is. This should be created by Product and maintained by both Product and Support.
• Improvements to the portal’s user interface, user experience, and backend processes and integrations.
• Provide regular and clear updates to the Sales and Customer Success organizations about work in progress and upcoming work that has an impact on those customer facing organizations.

Support

Directly Responsible Individual Donique Smit

• Support, triage and work the Zendesk License and Renewal queue.
• Provide feedback to teams that intersect with the portal.
• Document known bugs and workarounds in appropriate locations as identified by Product.
• Participate in single lane channel identified by Sales to request help from Support.
• Work with Sales Systems team to resolve Salesforce synchronization problems.
• Create: “Support” contacts on accounts.

Business Operations

Directly Responsible Individual Jamie Carey

• Provide support to Sales, Support, and Product in creating interdepartmental feedback loops, workflows, and processes.
• Continue to monitor and illuminate gaps.
• Document the relationship between the customer portal and the product for Docs and Sales to provide to the customer during onboarding.
• Work with Product, Sales, and Support on a unified list of product features and functionality in prioritized order for Product.
• Work with Billing on adding dunning features into Zuora (ie notices to customer on expired credit cards on file).

Finance Operations

Directly Responsible Individual Alex Westbrook

• Primary administration of Zuora.
• Work with Sales Systems and Growth team to identify gaps, improve integrations between systems.
• Participate in end to end testing of enterprise application ecosystem.

Sales Systems

Directly Responsible Individual Jack Brennan

• Primary administration of Salesforce.
• Work with Finance Operations and Growth team to identify gaps, improve integrations between systems.
• Participate in end to end testing of enterprise application ecosystem.
• Resolve: Salesforce to Zendesk synchronization problems.

High Level Setup

Some Documentation

• video of custom setup
• Security's Compliance Diagram
• Growth Team's Portal Diagram
• .com renewal flow Diagram
• Trade Compliance
• Sales flow
• Usage ping on self-managed
• .com purchase flow video/customer app
• self managed purchase flow video
• trial .com video
• walkthrough video of purchasing CI minutes
• entry points, integration users google sheet
• customer app purchase process walkthrough

Customer Flow

System Integrations

Important to know

• WIP: Lucidchart diagram lead to cash through systems
• READ ME customer portal repo
• API should send country codes ISO 2 from portal to SFDC and Marketo

Zuora and Salesforce

Zuora details

• Communication Profiles:
  • New accounts are set to Default Profile
  • Silent Profile is used temporarily when the customer should not receive notifications
• Product list in Zuora

Definitions

• Start Date (Subscription): the start date of this transaction
• Subscription Term Start Date: the start date of the subscription itself
• active_user_count: is pulling any user who is not blocked or deactivated, used in usage ping
• current_active_users_count: the active user count applicable for billing purposes and captured in the daily cron job. This is labeled billable_users in usage ping. This value does not count the users which are not applicable to billing:
  • GitLab generated service bots
  • Guest users in Ultimate subscriptions

Change Management

Adding new SKUs

• When a new SKU is added, the Fulfillment team must be notified thirty (30) days in advance with the requirements so that they can prepare the customer applications.

SFDC Sandbox Refresh

• When the SFDC sandbox is refreshed, the Fulfillment team is notified and the SFDC sandbox is reintegrated with the Zuora sandbox.

Definitions of users

Self-managed EE

• a license holder is someone who pays for a GitLab license and manages the payments for a self-managed installation. EULA, TOU, FOSS LICENSE, EE LICENSE
• a self-managed admin is someone who manages the installation and users of a self-managed installation. FOSS LICENSE, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/blob/master/ee/LICENSE
• a self-managed user is someone who uses a self-managed installation. FOSS LICENSE, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/blob/master/ee/LICENSE

Dotcom

• a dotcom subscriber is someone who pays for dotcom. EULA, TOU
• a dotcom user are people who can be assigned to seats that a dotcom subscriber is paying for. TOU

Self-managed FOSS

• a self-managed admin is someone who manages the installation and users of a self-managed installation. FOSS LICENSE
• a self-managed user is someone who uses a self-managed installation. FOSS LICENSE

Related Documentation and Links: Licensing, Billing, Transactions

• Customer Portal: General Issues
• Issue: Analysis: Licenses & Terms
• EULAs/TOS: As-Is + To-Be
• Licenses/Self Managed: As-Is + To-Be
• Troubleshooting: True Ups, Licenses + EULAs
• Troubleshooting subscription and licensing problems
• License documentation
• Customer Portal: Admin internal documentation
• Epic: Analysis: License and Billing Queue

Refunds

When might Billing cancel and/or downgrade a subscription?

• request from the customer to have it cancelled as they don’t want to use it in the future
• customer bought the wrong number of seats and we refund due to this; we would not downgrade as we know that the customer will repurchase soon and we don’t want to cause disruption
• we need to change the entity of an account at renewal (sales assisted only). In this case, the subscription will be cancelled and a new one will be created under a new account.
• if credit card payment is declined for auto-renewed accounts (.com)

Licensing and Renewals (L&R) Queue in Zendesk

The customer portal intersects with Support, Billing, Sales, and Product primarily. Tickets come into the L&R queue in Zendesk generally three ways, generally prioritized as low:

• by emailing renewals@gitlab.com
• by opening a support ticket and selecting Help with my license
• by filling out the form on the Renewals page The L&R Queue is a separate queue of Zendesk tickets that fall outside of the scope of customer product support; it's handled by Support by triaging the issue and rerouting the tickets to the appropriate team.
• Passing to Sales: Pass tickets relating to IACV to Sales via cc to Sales in reply to ticket which sends an email to both customer and account owner. If an account is associated with the ticket, there's a ticket object in SFDC. It's then Sales's responsibility to continue the customer interaction and the BSS closes the Zendesk ticket.
• Passing to Sales: If a ticket comes in and Support is unable to determine the account owner or the inquiry is related to new business, they reach out to the SFDC chatter group ZD-newbusiness where the SDR Regional leads for EMEA, APAC and AMER/LATAM provide an answer. Then Support cc's that person on the ticket and closes in Zendesk.
  • Regional Leads for SDRs:
    • AMER/LATAM - Mona Elliot
    • APAC - Jay Thomas-Burrows
    • EMEA - Elsje Smart
• Passing to Billing: The mechanism to pass tickets to the Billing team is to open the ticket, then change the field form from the value Upgrades, Renewals & AR (refunds) to Accounts Receivable/Refunds. This puts the ticket into the Billing Team's queue which they then manage.

Notifications

Notification Emails

Emails notifications are sent through Mailgun

• Reseller Notification: this email is delivered from the customers portal after the customer accepts the EULA.
  • HAML/HTML
  • Text
• Customer - Accept Terms Request: this email is delivered from the customers' portal when the EULA is required to be accepted before delivering the license.
  • HAML/HTML
  • Text
• Customer - License Email: this email is delivered from the license app after the license is created following the EULA acceptance.
  • HAML/HTML
  • Text