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Customer Service Key to Closing Sales and Retaining Clients
Managed services providers (MSPs) generally have to expect to clear many hurdles when first approaching a potential client, and those hurdles only multiply while traversing the path to a long-term, working MSP/client relationship.
While MSPs are a growing and influential force in the information technology (IT) realm, with companies small and large looking to them to fill specific IT requirements, they still have to navigate an IT business landscape that can be rife with preconceptions and suspicion.
Intruder Alert
In IT environments both fledgling and long-established, an incoming MSP can often be seen as an intruding entity, so the onus is on the MSP to prove it’s trustworthy, responsive to client requests and responsible enough to be given access to the business’ critical data, information and IT applications. What’s more, it has to accomplish all this in a competitive field of other ambitious MSPs eager to capitalize on any mistakes or shortcomings. On top of that, MSPs must show the cost benefits a potential client may realize by leveraging the IT expertise a MSP can bring to the table.
“Most of our clients are what I would classify as small businesses when it comes to IT,” said John Pavlik, president of Hillboro, Ore.-based Resource One Inc. “They typically don’t have anybody on staff who is a professional IT manager, so it’s pretty easy to show them the benefit of having a team of IT professionals manage their network and have access to them versus trying to go out and hire somebody; if you do the math, we’re less expensive. It’s just a fairly simple business decision from a standpoint of cost. For MSPs catering to larger clients, showing the cost benefits is maybe a bit more difficult. It really depends on whether a client has an existing IT infrastructure and personnel, and how extensive and complex that infrastructure is.”
Given all of these considerations, once an MSP navigates its way into the position of being brought on by a client to provide some or all of their IT needs, the MSP should take steps to ensure finalization of the sale, and those steps fall almost exclusively into the area of customer service. After trying to win over a client for an extended period of time, there’s a risk of an MSP becoming complacent and thinking it knows the client better than it actually does. As a result, responsive customer service can slip, possibly allowing a competing MSP to exploit the situation and turn a “sure thing” into a lost opportunity. Along those same lines, an MSP could have an existing, long-term client suddenly opt for a competitor due to lackluster customer service and responsiveness.
Customer Service
“Lately, what we’ve heard from a couple of companies we’ve talked to, they’ve had just terrible service experiences from their existing IT company; in some cases having to wait a week or more for a call back,” said Pavlik. “To me, that’s completely unacceptable and really bad business—with us, you’re going to probably get in touch with someone right away, if not we’ll get back to you within an hour or two. But, it also seems to happen more often than you might think; failing to provide really good customer service can easily cost you potential customers and even customers you’ve had for some time.”
For potential customers MSPs must establish trust and exude a real commitment to availability and accessibility from the first phone call to a service call three years down the line. Customers looking to an MSP to take on some or all of their IT needs have an expectation that those needs will be met and any inadequacies will be dealt with in a timely manner. The slightest dereliction in meeting these expectations can quickly translate into a lost potential client opportunity or, worse, the loss of an existing account to an ambitious and more responsive competitor. It may seem like a common-sense understanding on its face, but it’s a very easy fundamental rule to lose sight of, particularly for those MSPs that have become comfortable with their success.
“It’s surprising sometimes how often companies can forget, or at least neglect, the importance of maintaining good customer service,” said Pavlik. “I guess you could say we’re a smaller outfit, so one of our strong selling points—maybe even our strongest—is our customer service. For larger managed services providers, I can see how they might get sidetracked with other business concerns, but an MSP of any size should continually remind itself of the necessity of customer service and always look at ways to improve in that area. As soon as they put less emphasis on customer service, I think it’s only a matter of time before they start losing clients and fail to bring on new customers.”
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