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MSPs Strive to Maintain Good Customer Relationships
April 2008
Ask any business—large or small—what’s most important in keeping businesses successful and you’ll probably get the same answer: the customers. Customers, especially satisfied customers, are key to sustaining a business. Even though the world of information technology (IT) is constantly changing and shaping our business practices, one simple fact has gone unchanged since day one: Businesses that maintain good working relationships with clients will be successful.
This is true for even the largest of businesses, such as Ingram Micro. Ingram Micro Inc., which has offices worldwide as well as home offices in Santa Anna, Calif., Buffalo, N.Y., and Toronto, Canada, is the world’s largest technology distributor and a leading technology sales, marketing and logistics company. “We handle everything from product delivery; pick, pack and ship; global logistics for vendors; financing; and configuration services,” said Justin Crotty, vice president of services for Ingram Micro North America. “The service division has managed services, professional IT labor services and warranty-maintenance services. We have a huge portfolio of capabilities across the board.”
That huge portfolio is what attracts customers to Ingram Micro. “We actually go out and aggressively look for solution providers that we are not doing business with and attempt to establish relationships with those folks. So, we are aggressive with new customer acquisition, but we have got a good reputation in the channel and many of those customers are doing business with us at some level,” he explained.
Maintaining Service Levels
What keeps Ingram Micro’s customers coming back, however, is the level of service they come to expect from the company. When it comes to ensuring customer satisfaction, Crotty said the company’s sales and marketing organization maintains excellent relationships with customers. “We are well known for our service levels; well known for our sales support and account support,” said Crotty. “You know, it is a people business like any other business, so we have great relationships with all of our key solution providers.”
Serving 150 countries with roughly 150,000 customers worldwide, Ingram Micro offers many different methods for customers to conduct their business. “They can do it on the Web; they can have account support either on our inside team or field support with our outside team. We have got a very sophisticated sales, marketing and customer-support organization to take care of our partners,” he added.
It’s this flexibility and these options that keep customers happy. But what happens when customers want to submit feedback on all of these different business methods? Customers don’t need to fill out online forms or endure a two-day wait to get a response from Ingram Micro. Crotty said customers always have a direct connection to someone at the company.
“Our organization is very accessible to our customers,” said Crotty. “Many of our customers know the executive team here and know them personally, so many times my phone will ring or the other executive teams’ phones will ring—or we will get e-mails—and customers will give us feedback. It is the traditional way feedback comes into the organization. The good news is we are very receptive to it. The executive team and really anybody at Ingram is accessible to any customer.”
A Two-Way Street
Maintaining a successful relationship with customers is a two-way street. Customers won’t maintain a partnership with a business if they don’t feel that business is addressing their needs. Crotty said Ingram Micro is constantly working to aggressively perfect the way customers conduct business with the company. “There is always 100 little things you can go change if you could do it overnight,” said Crotty. “We are aggressively pursuing the feedback we get about what needs to be fixed or what we know needs to be fixed and I think that is why customers like us. They know we understand what we are not doing well, we go out and we fix it and we deliver against those expectations typically.”
Ultimately, maintaining a good relationship with customers is about give and take. And managed service providers (MSPs) must step up to the task since they provide a very important service to customers. Without customers, MSPs wouldn’t exist.
“Managed services providers have to provide a better level of customer interface and support than a traditional business because the expectations are that they are very integral to the operations of the clients that they serve,” said Crotty. “So they have to be even more mindful of service-level problems or potential problems that can be encountered there. I think the onus is even higher on MSPs to provide an exceptional level of support because that is their value proposition to their customers.”
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