Like it or not, the reality for MSPs is that they’re only an SLA breach or significant outage away from losing a customer. This immense contractual pressure is a significant motivator that drives MSPs to develop sophisticated approaches to continuous service improvement.
In my experience as an MSP executive and in discussions with leading MSPs around the world, I’ve seen many innovative programs developed to drive home service quality. Here are just a few real world examples. And best of all, you don’t need to be a Six Sigma black belt to make these changes part of your day-to-day service ethic.
Continuous Service Improvement isn’t a Project, it’s a Way of Life!
Service improvement needs to feed into all aspects of an MSP’s daily operations—including organizational reporting, hiring practices, compensation planning, customer communication, engineering operating procedures, and more.
For example, when employees are compensated (at least partially) based on customer satisfaction metrics, they are more likely to go the extra mile, and deliver service that delights, rather than underwhelms, customers. Beyond formal compensation models that drive satisfaction, managers can develop ad hoc programs that recognize excellent service “in the moment.” One MSP manager I know keeps $50 gift cards for local restaurants in their portfolio, and uses them to recognize superlative efforts in real time.
When hiring talent, finding engineers and support professionals with advanced certifications and killer IT skills is not enough. The interview gauntlet should vet candidates for their history of dealing with failure as well as success. Despite best efforts, outages will happen. It is important that engineering and project staff are honest in their assessment of their own post-incident performance. There is no room for defensiveness. In demanding blunt assessments of their performance and that of their co-workers, unforeseen incidents can be discussed and analyzed as a learning experience, an opportunity to improve rather than just an opportunity to be punitive. Likewise, support managers should be hired with a track record of orchestrating these “learning moments” for their staff.
Across the board, management and staff should be encouraged and motivated to come up with better ways of doing things. One MSP I know has a $50 prize for employees who submit a suggestion that drives a signification improvement in service quality. At an MSP where I worked, our engineering managers paid out a quarterly reward for the most creative and practical suggestions that improved the customer experience. The monetary award was appreciated, but what really made the program special was the selection process—peers would nominate their coworkers to the leadership team and submit the quality improvement case study for review. So in addition to the cash, accolades were received from colleagues and the supervisor—a motivational “home run”!
Defining the Right Measures
The saying goes that “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” and it’s true. Establishing baselines and tracking improvements is the only way to determine whether progress is being made in improving service delivery. But how do you determine which areas are the most important to track? Following are a few of the most critical areas to measure for any MSP:
- Customer retention. Highly satisfied customers stay customers, and unhappy ones exercise their right of market choice and leave. That’s why tracking retention is so vital. Year over year retention rates should be in the 90% and higher range.
- SLA compliance. SLAs are the means our customers use to measure our performance, so it’s vital to track success in SLA compliance. How many breaches have occurred? How is that number tracking over time.
- SLA credits. The degree to which an MSP is issuing SLA credits is also a similarly vital aspect to track. MSPs should track SLA credits as a percentage of monthly recurring revenue.
- Customer satisfaction. MSPs should create formal processes for ongoing customer surveys, and also to do surveys after big projects, in order to gauge customers’ perception of the services being delivered.
Those are just a few of my tips. If you have additional guidance to share I’ll be watching the comment area.
Phil LaForge is VP and GM, service providers at Nimsoft. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship. Read all of Nimsoft’s guest blogs here.
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Phil,
Great post! One of the best things to do is to tie compensation to customer satisfaction. If, at every level of a project team, there is some $$ tied to the customer’s satisfaction level, there is more attention to detail and more attention put towards making sure that the project is on track to meet the customers actual expectations rather than simply a engineering team executing a project plan in a vacuum.
Same with support desk customer satisfaction scores.
Right on Phil!!
Phil,
Great Stuff! This post not only hit home with me about measuring customer satisfaction, but that a simple plan or low-cost recognition can foster a culture that goes the extra mile assisting clients. The best performers on my staff approach every customer ticket with the thought “someone is unable to do their job effectively until I fix this problem”. That level of commitment is not lost on the customer and that alone can be the difference in retaining a client when a SLA is missed.
We learned while cash is always appreciated (we have a Tech of the Quarter bonus and programs for sales leads), a simple public acknowledgement of Job well done in the form of a companywide email or during a staff meeting can make a difference with many members of your team. When the staff is happy and is comfortable with the process in place, meeting SLA’s becomes commonplace.
Thanks for your insight!
Brian Doyle
http://www.fandotech.com
Brian,
Building a culture that supports service excellence starts with the hiring process, doesn’t it? Tech skills are valuable assets to have. But tech skills without passion for customer service can be downright dangerous, i.e. “I am the smartest IT guy and my customer is too dense to get it” syndrome. I am curious. How do you identify this passion for service in the hiring process?
P.S. I love the “Tech of the Quarter” Program. Who doesn’t like and appreciate peer recognition for above and beyond performance?
@Phil – I completely agree tech skills without passion for CS is very risky for an MSP! I’d love to hear what other companies do to achieve that. This is how we approach things:
We look carefully for this attitude in interviewing, and generally find it comes out in response to very basic questions like, “how do you handle a demanding client?” or “how do you explain a solution to a client (ie the problem is user error)?”, etc. We ask questions to see how they answer it, not what they say.
We also have candidates interview with a non-technical team member (often I do this, being in marketing). I look for eye contact, smiling, adjusting their speech so I understand their technical explanations (but not making me feel dumb), confidence, etc. No one moves on in the process who doesn’t pass this aspect. It’s as valued as technical know-how.
It can take a long time to find candidates who have personality AND brains – but when we find someone, wow are they a gem!
Rebecca Everding
http://www.motherG.com
@Phil – I completely agree that tech skills w/o passion and commitment to the client is a bad combination. I’d love to hear what others do to achieve this.
For us, as you said, it absolutely starts in the hiring process. We handle this in a few ways. One is just in the questions we ask. We focus a lot on how do you handle a client who is frustrated/confused/irritating, etc. We ask questions to see more how they approach it, and not so much what they actually say (did they take a moment to think about a difficult question, did they answer it with authority, did they make me feel confident they understood). When they give examples of past client interactions, we look to see how they are talking about the client – are they rude and arrogant? Or are they glad they could help someone?
We also have every serious candidate meet with a non-technical team member (often myself). I look for eye contact, smiling, being able to adjust their speech so a non-technical person can understand (without being condescending). No one makes it through the process without passing this part.
It’s hard to find that combo of personality and brains! But when we do find someone, they are beloved by clients and team members.
Rebecca Everding
http://www.motherG.com
Phil.
I think of the same qualities I used in looking at hiring consulting engineers apply in hiring MSP staff. IT relationships are built on trust and goes beyond the typical client/vendor relationship. When hiring field engineers we look for people that are engaging and have a personality to form some type of personal bond with our clients. If you are looking to be a heads down consultant then my company is likely not for you.
When hiring MSP professionals, especially at the entry level, we look for people that have general computer skills (we can train what they don’t know) but have soft skills. They need to keep the customer engaged while on the phone during a support call. The key to success on our helpdesk is putting the client at ease and solving the issue. No one likes dead air when on the phone.
One of our most successful hires was trying to break into IT and had limited professional IT exposure, but during each phase of his interview process (we have a process that includes both management and potential peers) people came out impressed with his ability to converse easily with people at all levels of our company. We took a chance even with his limited skills and within a month of hire he was handling most of his call load without supervision or the need to escalate most issues. Customer feedback was terrific.
So what do we look for when interviewing. I ask a simple question, one that usually tells you more than anything on their resume. What did you do before entering IT? Resumes usually only show what a person has done since entering into their desired profession. I want to know what you did before IT. Were you working through college? Washing dishes? Delivering pizza? Working retail? Nothing at all? Often what people did before entering the professional world will tell you a lot about how far above and beyond they will go in times of crisis and how they will treat the client during those events.
A bit long winded, but you hit on topic I believe strongly.
Brian
Phil, Great article – your advice is dead on. Creating a culture of continuous service improvement was our number one goal last year. As a company, we adopted a corporate philosophy that a product or service that isn’t working up to customer standards isn’t one worth having at all – this philosophy was driven truly from the CEO down throughout the entire company.
We instituted a formalized hiring process that looks at technical as well as customer service skills. We developed standardized internal training procedures that all our service reps must complete. And we invested in monitoring tools that track and record call statistics, giving us baseline numbers to work off of. In addition, each customer is surveyed by an independent third-party after every interaction with our customer service team – the results of these surveys are sent to our entire management team each week.
Ultimately, however, it was the commitment company-wide that put the customers and their needs first that created the biggest difference. Everyone at Apptix – from executives to operations to technicians – takes customer service as the core tenant of his or her job responsibility.
Marcelo Gonzales
Director of Customer Service
Apptix
Great post Phil , we use Netpromoter to measure the overall business success in delivering the right level of service to our customers, we’ve then created “Service Addiction” which is all about going the extra mile for our customers.
The customers are now aware of our continual efforts to improve and we reward our staff when they’re seen as outstanding performers through a cash bonus, dinner and a rugby game and just general public acknowledgement of their efforts.