Roles

Sustentus is a multi-perspective platform. Every user belongs to one of six roles, each with a distinct view of the service journey and a different set of capabilities in the platform.

Vendor

The organisation that sources service leads and manages customer relationships. Vendors are the primary paying subscribers of the platform.

What they see:

• Dashboard — CSAT metrics, customer performance, regional statistics, and full-funnel conversion reporting
• Leads — All leads across the pipeline with status, assigned expert, and timeline
• Customers — Customer list with invitation management and relationship tracking
• Team — Internal team members and territory assignments
• Create Lead — Multi-step lead creation form for manually sourcing leads

What they care about:

• Conversion rate at every stage of the funnel (lead → activated → engaged → bid pool → delivered)
• Time-in-stage metrics and bottleneck identification
• Bid response rates — are experts engaging with their leads?
• CSAT scores from completed projects

How they onboard: Vendors sign up via the marketing site, selecting a subscription tier (Self-Service, Growth, Managed, or Partner). On signup, a tenant is provisioned with isolated data, configurable workflows, and embeddable lead capture forms.

Customer

The end-user requesting a service. Customers are typically introduced to the platform by a vendor.

What they see:

• Projects — Status and details of their active and completed projects
• Finances — Quotes, invoices, and payment history
• Create Request — Submit a new service request (lead)
• Help Centre — Support resources

What they care about:

• Progress on their service request — where is it in the journey?
• Clear, jargon-free status updates (not internal terminology like “bid pool”)
• Transparent pricing via quotes and invoices
• Quality of the assigned expert

How they interact with AI: When a lead is created on their behalf, the customer logs in and engages with the BRD Agent. The agent asks one question at a time to gather business requirements, covering seven topics in sequence: business context, goals and success criteria, target audience, current approach, budget and timeline, systems and integrations, and stakeholders. The customer approves the resulting BRD before it enters the bid pool.

Expert

The service provider who bids on and delivers projects. Experts maintain their own profile in My Knowledge — seniority and years of experience, the industries they serve, the skills they can deliver with a proficiency level and years for each, products, and structured availability — plus bank details for payouts. These datapoints make experts matchable to the right leads.

What they see:

• Bid Pool — Available leads matching their expertise, open for proposals
• Proposals — Their submitted proposals with status tracking
• Projects — Active projects with milestone progress
• Invoices — Invoice creation and payment tracking per milestone
• My Knowledge — Profile and matchable expertise: position, bio, seniority and years of experience, industries served, skills with a per-skill proficiency and years, products, and structured availability (weekly capacity, earliest start date, work mode)
• My Team — Team members and collaborations

What they care about:

• New leads in the bid pool that match their skills
• Status of their submitted proposals (pending, accepted, rejected)
• Milestone completion and payment status
• Earnings and payout tracking

How bidding works: Experts browse the bid pool, review the BRD attached to each lead, and submit a proposal with a title, summary, price, timeline, and milestones. Multiple experts can bid on the same lead. If an expert finds a BRD unclear or problematic, they can flag it for manager review rather than submitting a blind bid.

CSM (Customer Success Manager)

Internal customer-facing role. CSMs ensure engagement quality and step in when the automated process needs human intervention.

What they see:

• Leads Management — Full lead pipeline with ability to create, assign, and progress leads
• User Management — Manage team members and assignments
• Activity Tracking — Monitor all activities and status changes
• Finances — Quotes, invoices, and financial reporting
• Products — Service catalogue management
• CSAT — Customer satisfaction scores and trends
• Skills — Skill categories and expertise area management

When they get involved:

• An expert flags a BRD as unclear or problematic
• A customer goes cold during the engagement phase
• A lead has been sitting in the bid pool with no proposals
• A dispute arises during project delivery

CSMs handle exceptions, not the standard flow. The goal is for AI and automation to handle the process while CSMs focus on the 5–10% of cases that need human judgement.

SDM (Service Delivery Manager)

Internal expert-facing role. SDMs manage expert performance and delivery standards.

What they see: Same capabilities as CSM, with an emphasis on expert management:

• Expert performance — Bid success rates, delivery timelines, CSAT scores per expert
• Delivery oversight — Milestone progress across active projects
• Quality control — Reviewing flagged BRDs and proposals

When they get involved:

• An expert is underperforming or missing milestone deadlines
• Proposal quality is low and needs coaching
• Expert pool gaps — no suitable experts for a category of leads
• Onboarding new experts and verifying their qualifications

Admin

Platform administrator with full system access.

What they see:

• Everything — Full dashboard with system-wide analytics
• Settings — A single consolidated settings hub at /admin/settings with a tab per configuration area (tenant settings, locations, services, products, industries, commercial, SLA, escalation, integrations, statuses, setup checklist, demo data). Tenant settings are backed by a canonical registry, so every default setting is present and discoverable
• Status viewer — A read-only view of the status workflow in the statuses tab at /admin/settings/statuses
• Snapshot Management — Create, restore, and manage database snapshots (demo tenants)
• User Management — Create and manage users across all roles
• System Configuration — Automation rules and tenant-level settings

Unique capabilities:

• View the status workflow — statuses, transitions, and per-persona labels are defined in version-controlled JSON (packages/services/src/db/workflows/workflows.json) and changed in-repo via a pull request, not edited at runtime; the statuses tab at /admin/settings/statuses is a read-only viewer
• Configure service fee percentages and other tenant-level settings
• Manage demo environments with snapshot create/restore
• Access audit logs and system health information

Role-Based Data Visibility

The same underlying data is presented differently depending on the viewer’s role.