MSPs are meant to be seen, not heard?

This title of this blog may sound familiar to those of you over a certain age, but I thought it would make an interesting discussion in light of a commonly recurring theme our profession has faced for many years; customer service in managed services. Every event I attend where managed services are discussed, the issue of customer service, value, and perceived value, inevitably arise. Customers and MSPs alike seem to struggle with this issue and I wonder if we need a more public discourse on this topic involving both MSPs and customers. Here is the issue as I see it.

MSPs, when they are doing a good job, will never be seen. They don't appear onsite (at least not to perform break/fix work), they don't experience a large amount of unplanned downtime, and they ideally produce an IT environment that is, for the most part, trouble free and calm.

For the customer, this type of environment is probably foreign to them and not something they can truly appreciate until it goes away. What I mean is that customers who have grown up in a break/fix relationship, typically have a challenging time becoming familiar with what a normal functioning IT environment should be. This is a problem for the following reasons.

1. Customers who are familiar with break/fix relationships equate the value of their provider with how frequently they see them, as if the only time the MSP is providing value is when they are seen on location and performing work. This is simply not true and understood as false by most MSPs.
2. Break/fix customers generally view their IT environments as constantly needing attention and care that can only be delivered while onsite. This is a common "teachable moment" that too few MSPs have successfully overcome.
3. For a long time, customers have simply viewed their IT assets as constantly being in a state of repair, or in between states of repair. Seldom does IT work consistently, at least in their opinion.

MSPs can do their work just fine remotely. In fact, MSPs need to be remote in order to achieve the ecnomies of scale necessary for them to acculumate tools, people, and processes that allow them to perform their work. But, how does a MSP communicate this new relationship to a customer?

The customer experience in all this is what needs to be addressed. The break/fix customer experience could be easily described as a) problem exists, b) customer calls IT provider to come onsite, c) sharply dressed technician arrives and performs their work, d) IT assets work again, until the next problem, e) repeat cycle...

In managed services, the customer experience needs to change. Customers need to know that the MSP is doing work, but must associate that work not with onsite presence but with better performing IT environments. Still, there are critical reasons why the MSP needs to be "visible" to the customer in order to achieve the following objectives: