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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- MSPs need open communication with the customer to relay sensitive information about the state of the network. Things like reports, frequent conference calls, or even onsite meetings (different from break/fix visits) need to be delivered in order to communicate value to the customer.
- MSPs need to plan with the customer in order to maintain the network properly. Planned outages, upgrades, migrations, and other changes to the IT environment need to be discussed beforehand, in order to minimize any downtime.
- MSPs cannot and should not be ignored. Just because they do their work remotely does not mean they will never been heard from again. MSPs should have a constant line of communication with their customers; it's just good common sense.
In my opinion, customers have the best managed services customer experience when they have an ongoing and interactive dialog with their MSP, but not the same type of break/fix relationship they used to have. Customers have to be engaged in the managed services relationship, otherwise they will forget, and ultimately dismiss the value they receive from the MSP. MSPs are not children and should both be seen and heard from in order to properly utilize their expertise. Only when this happens will the customer experience exist so that the value of the MSP is understood and appreciated.
