Vendor management

An MSP Guide to Happy Customers

Shawn Lazarus brings a fresh take to marketing strategy with his engineering background and global perspective. He currently oversees the product marketing, social media, digital marketing, and brand management for OnPage which helps an MSP server their clients better.

An MSP’s ability to do effective work depends on their technical expertise. However, their ability to ensure customer satisfaction is what really grows their business. This is because high levels of customer satisfaction retain current clients and win over future ones. Given this reality, an MSP needs to be strategic about how they approach their work as every interaction is an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

With a few customer service guidelines, you can ensure you’re not only impressing potential clients, but also keeping existing ones happy. Not sure where to start? The tips below will help you improve communications with your clients, as well as establish business practices that reinforce the importance of customer relationships.

Develop a Strong Onboarding Policy

The first way to establish a strong foundation for customer satisfaction is to develop a strong onboarding policy. Onboarding defines the process of how new customers get integrated into your company’s workflow. The onboarding process should include straight-forward tasks such as cataloging a customer’s infrastructure, migrating the customer to a standard set of technology offerings, refreshing old hardware, and rolling in standard MSP tool sets.

However, the most important aspect of onboarding is documentation. Document the key processes for any new client you onboard so that when their technology is not functioning properly, your engineers can come in and properly assess and diagnose the problem. This documentation includes important items such as site details, site plans, and credentials for logging in to important software.

These expectations should be articulated during customer training so that the customer is apprised of how to contact your company and what to expect when they call during business hours or after hours. After their onboarding is complete, customers should know the answer to basic service questions, such as how long they should expect to wait until someone returns their call.

Set Client Expectations with SLAs

After onboarding a new client, a good MSP will provide them with a plan that offers a clearly defined time period in which issues will be fixed. This plan will also promise the client updates on all key stages of the incident resolution process. This is the essence of the MSP’s service level agreement (SLA). A strong SLA will help ensure you’re managing expectations, communicating effectively, and executing properly.

  • Manage Expectations: Focus on setting expectations around the time it will take you to call customers back, how long it will take until a tech is on site to fix an issue, and what a typical maintenance schedule will look like. Map out the customer journey and describe what the customer can expect from your business from beginning to end.
  • Effectively Communicate: There is often a lot of stumbling with communication. For effective client communications, develop a plan that helps you articulate the big picture. The plan should explain what happens when an issue arises for the customer and how you will respond. If there is the need for disaster recovery, how will you handle the process to get them back online?
  • Execute Properly: Effective execution is about getting the project done in a timely manner. When you’re unable to effectively execute, it’s likely because you lack either the time or personnel to deliver on what you’ve promised. You can accomplish this with two essential elements: collaboration and coordination. A business management software like ConnectWise Manage® enables you to easily centralize documentation, assign action items, track progress toward due dates, and report down to individual tasks seamlessly—ensuring no late or unfinished projects. In addition, employing an Incident Management tool like OnPage allows you to effectively execute alerts that come in from ConnectWise Manage in a timely manner. MSPs can equip even the smallest of staffs with an Incident Management Platform that allows the team to work after hours in shifts and handle alerts that are deftly sent to their smartphones, so they can attend to the alerts anytime, anywhere.
Leverage Automation

How much time is your staff spending on repetitive (yet necessary) tasks? How much more time would they have during the day if some of these tasks were automated? When repetitive yet necessary tasks are performed automatically with the right tools, the work is completed quickly and with a lower risk of human error. This also enables your staff to apply their advanced knowledge and expertise to more critical projects.

Some repeatable tasks you can automate include prioritizing tickets, routine maintenance, software upgrades, disk updates, patching, or end-virus remediation. By having tools automate these processes, your staff can spend more time on projects, planning, or providing proactive service to your customers—keeping them happy.

To take full advantage of the benefits of business automation, you’ll need tools such as a remote monitoring and management system, a ticketing system, a customer relationship management system (CRM), anti-virus solution, a remote access tool, malware detection solution, a critical alerting tool, and PBX systems—depending on your business’s specific needs.

While keeping customers happy sounds like it should be straightforward, anyone who has worked as an MSP knows that customer satisfaction is the secret sauce that separates one MSP from another. Simple things like clear communications with your clients and introducing a few new tools to your tool kit can make a huge difference in how your clients see you. By setting clear expectations and freeing up your staff from manual, repeatable tasks, you can develop strong relationships with new customers and keep your existing customers happy.

This article was provided by our service partner : Connectwise