Providing More Value to Your Customers over Time

Providing IT and security services is not a “set it and forget it” business. To maintain client relationships, MSPs and VARs need to continually evaluate and evolve their services, the technology they provide and their communication strategies. Customer needs and demands change all the time, and service providers must keep up to ensure long-term, mutually beneficial business partnerships.

But as an MSP, how can you achieve this? Here are a few best practices you can follow:

If your clients lose track of why they’re continuing to pay you, you may not be effectively communicating what you’re doing for them on a daily basis. Regular reporting is key–as is transparency. Provide reporting of all the services you’ve provided, including successes and failures. Reporting bad news isn’t exactly appealing, but if you can demonstrate how you quickly responded to and addressed those issues–and what you’ll do to make them less likely in the future–clients will appreciate the information.

How often clients want those reports will vary based on your business and that of your customers. Some many want to keep it to a quarterly update, but many will want more frequent reports, particularly regarding uptime and security details. Providing regular updates on ticket and patch status, as well as incident reports outlining threat levels or attack/breach mitigation, will help clients see how much value you’re creating. Schedule regular meetings that focus on your performance, as well as strategic approaches to emerging client needs.

 The right remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool can help you quickly identify and address potential system failures or security issues before they create costly downtime or data breaches. These tools not only provide a centralized dashboard for full visibility across the client base, but also help to automate more remediation and service delivery tasks and enable remote support and resolution. These tools also can help you more easily create the comprehensive reporting outlined above.

 Just as you would encourage your customers to review and optimize processes before a technology deployment, you should periodically review your own workflows and processes to improve efficiency. The methods you established when you first set up your business, or when you first began offering a particular service, may not have evolved with your offering. The more process steps and manual activities you can remove, the more responsive (and profitable) you’ll become. You’ll also want to audit your internal security practices and training to ensure that your employees are providing a strong human layer of security to complement the solutions and services your business delivers.

Once you’ve reviewed your processes, make sure they’re well defined, repeatable and thoroughly documented. This will not only help you internally, it will also demonstrate to clients that you can quickly and professionally address their needs.

When trying to win new business, it’s tempting to promise clients the moon, with little regard to exactly how you’ll achieve that. Make sure that service level agreements (SLAs) are reasonable and achievable, given your current capabilities. That will help you maintain profitability and set client expectations in a way that won’t lead to disappointment. As your services and capabilities evolve, revisit those agreements and update them.

Your team is interacting with customers and deploying your technology service offerings every day. Make sure there are clear, open processes in place so that they can contribute new ideas to improve operations, create new service packages and identify emerging customer needs that you can potentially address.

When you’ve identified new services or solutions, adjust your compensation approach to help encourage your team to promote and sell those services actively. Changing compensation can help accelerate the transition from older products or business models to newer ones.

By regularly evaluating your processes and services, and leveraging reporting that keeps clients updated and your staff actively engaged in improving the business, you can continually increase the value you provide your customers. This not only helps maintain your current business, but also puts you in a much better position to attract new clients.

Neal Bradbury is Vice President, MSP Strategic Partnerships, for Barracuda MSP, a provider of security and data protection solutions for managed services providers, where he is responsible for generating greater business value for the company’s MSP partner community and alliance partners.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.