The level of service you provide to your clients has a direct impact on their satisfaction with your partnership and, therefore, their loyalty to your company. To stay profitable as a managed service provider, it’s imperative to leave clients feeling reassured of their investment in your business after every touch point.
So, are you delivering consistently high-end IT support, or is your level of service headed toward a steep decline? Use the following three tactics to start elevating it today.
1. Leverage Your Process
Only when your employees know exactly what to do and how to do it can the IT services they deliver be truly effective. Therefore, to get maximum value from your IT process, there are three actions you should focus on:
- Defining: Identify your process in detail. When an IT ticket comes in, how does your team handle it? What is the workflow for dealing with issues that arise? Before you’re able to move forward, you need a holistic view of how your business is currently operating. Get your employees involved, too, by having them outline their own daily processes.
- Optimizing: Once you’ve defined your current operations, you’re in a much better position to determine how the process would unfold more efficiently. Optimize by asking employees how the process could be enhanced, and consider where you’d benefit from providing a higher level of IT support to your clients. Pinpoint and refine operations that are already successful, and spend more time working on those that are causing issues.
- Documenting: When you have all of your process components defined and optimized, document them. This is a step that many MSPs skip – and one that top MSPs pay great attention to. If you’re currently relying on employees to communicate processes to one another, you’re risking uniformity. Task each department with documenting their own parts of the process and updating them when changes are made.
2. Hire A Network Administrator
Many MSPs fail to fill one all-important position: the Network Administrator. After you’ve nailed down your process internally, you need someone who is dedicated to ensuring that it’s applied properly to your clients’ solutions. The Network Administrator’s role is purely proactive. He or she is working to monitor systems and upgrade networks before problems arise.
Perhaps you have a client that’s grown rapidly since the beginning of your engagement with them. Soon, they’ll outgrow the solution they currently use. Before that happens and they suffer from growth pains, your Network Administrator should recommend something that’s better suited to their growing number of employees and increased output.
Then, your Network Administrator becomes a competitive advantage, enabling you to provide clients with personalized, high-end IT service. Instead of clients having to contact your MSP with questions and problems, they have a resource who’s dedicated solely to checking in on them and proactively maintaining the health of their networks. That’s a definite selling point to capitalize on.
3. Charge The Full Value Of Your IT Services
Struggles with packaging and pricing are all too common for MSPs. With so much competition in the industry, you may be tempted to charge less for your services, but doing so is actually counterproductive.
When you lower your prices, you limit the amount of time you’re able to reasonably spend on each client without cutting into your profits. To deliver a higher level of IT support, your employees need adequate time.
Generally, MSPs should be charging 20-40% more for their services than they currently are. You may see that number and be concerned about losing business, but rest assured, there’s a way to avoid that.
Simply increase the value of your IT services, and clients will be more willing to pay a higher premium. There are a number of ways to do this, including options like adding the Network Administrator to your team and making regular client visits to perform system check-ups. Find your competitive edge and leverage it to charge more for your IT support – and deliver higher-quality service.
Interested in more ways to improve your IT service? Download How To Become A Top-Performing MSP: Your Guide To Providing Profitable IT Solutions.
