Before you race toward cloud services, mobile device management and other shiny opportunities, it’s time for VARs and MSPs to get back to basics. Start with your IT help desk and IT service desk strategy. Over the past three weeks, I’ve come to realize just how much your IT help desk will influence customer retention, customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
Why am I sold on your critical need for a great help desk? Let me paint the picture.
From January 2008 to August 2011, I had multiple roles at our small business (Nine Lives Media). In addition to running our blogs and websites, I was a virtual CIO of sorts — selecting and testing our IT platforms, and putting out IT fires from time to time. Was I very good at the job? Not really. Generally speaking, I can keep my own systems up and running pretty well. But I’m not an IT guru, and I have a day job running our online communities. I wasn’t very responsive as virtual CIO. And I often lacked a quick fix to IT problems.
Generally speaking, I think our small business was similar to the small businesses that VARs and MSPs support. Every small business has that de facto “tech support person” who isn’t really a tech person — and doesn’t really want that job. Those small businesses will surely value a stellar help desk experience.
Seeing the Light
I know I do. The reason: I’m no longer our virtual CIO. I gave up that responsibility on August 30, the day Penton Media announced it had acquired Nine Lives Media and our online communities. We now have an IT help desk to dial at Penton Media. In essence, Penton’s corporate IT department has become our managed services provider.
In recent weeks, our team of contributors has been dialing the Penton IT help desk for support as we set up our email systems, IP phone systems and more. Yes, we had plenty of questions. But we always got answers from experts. And the “customer experience” has been great.
What About Your Business?
So how does my example apply to MSPs? Roughly a year ago, ConnectWise CEO Arnie Bellini told me that MSPs need to use IT help desks and service desks to maintain customer control and deliver superior service and support. I “heard” the message but didn’t really “listen” to the meaning until I experienced Penton’s IT help desk.
For MSPs, an effective IT help desk can help to spot common issues across your customer base — and perhaps even a few emerging opportunities. In other words, your IT help desk, service desk and NOC (network operations center) are your eyes and ears into your customers’ businesses.
- Listen closely to incoming IT help desk calls and you’ll always know where to go next.
- Deliver a superior customer experience and your customers will always march forward with you.
Some big opportunities await MSPs and VARs. But sometimes it’s the simple stuff — a great IT help desk — that can drive customer loyalty and increased IT investments.
Read More About This Topic
Share This Post
Posted In: Help Desk and NOC Services
Tags: Arnie Bellini | ConnectWise | IT Help Desk | IT Service Desk | it support | Network Operations Center | Nine Lives Media Inc. | NOC | Penton Media | technology support
Interact: Add a Comment | Trackback Link | Permalink
Subscribe: RSS Feed
Take a look at our 
Hey Joe,
I agree with your comments.
User perceptions’ of IT and supporting MSPs are most affected by day-to-day service level performance and responsiveness to issues. These are the fundamental elements from which long-standing customer relationships are built and sustained. A well-structured service desk function becomes the critical means for MSPs to make, keep and improve brand promises of superior user experience.
Beyond the points made above, the service desk also provides historical insight into improving operational effectiveness. Monitoring the volume of issues can help prioritize process improvements. Monitoring the source of issues can help expedite resolving the root cause. Over time, such actions will drive down costs and continuously improve your customer’s experience.
Getting the fundamentals right and challenging yourself to improve will serve both you and your customers well. This is the only real basis or viable approach for expanding ones relationship with a customer. Some things will never change.
Best regards,
Chris O’Malley
Nimsoft CEO
Chris,
Great to hear from you. As masterIT CEO J. Michael Drake once told me: Measure everything, then improve from there. Closely parallels your thought process on service desk…
Best
-jp
Joe –
I couldn’t agree more. When customers call into our NOC, they are usually in need of emergency technical support on a piece of their business infrastructure. Outages like those can have serious impact on a business, so there is a lot of pressure to deliver a quick resolution. It’s equally as important to deliver a great customer experience, one that compliments the technical experience. A friendly, calm and engaging NOC will help to calm the most frenzied customer and ultimately leads to a better experience for both the customer and the MSP. Customers will often provide more detailed descriptions of issues and can be a more effective troubleshooting resource if they aren’t frazzled; just another reason for MSP’s to emphasize great customer service.
I also agree with your comment about listening closely to incoming IT help desk calls. Collecting that information and having it in a useful format gives your Service Development team the insight they need to deliver the next great service, using real customer experience and requests to back it up.
Dusten Tornow
Managed Services Practice Manager
MSN Communications
as an infrastructure managed service provider, getting proactive monitoring systems integrated with service desk, takes the customer relationship management to another level – more transparency to customer, more accountability on MSP, trust & respect generated with the customer
Dusten@3: Thanks for the insights from your company. Let me know if you see any evolving trends in terms of what your NOC and help desk need to support (tablets, mobile, etc.). Wondering how MSPs are coping as customer deployments evolve.
Thiru@4: Agreed. In my own case I’ve hit some bumps with a new VoIP phone system. But now that I have a relationship with the IT help desk, I basically mention my issue and trust them to correct it. My trust was instant, based on a few verbal conversations rather than generic email alerts… Gotta love personalized help desk service.
-jp
Hi Joe, I completely agree on your point that a simple IT help desk can increase your customer loyalty and retention drastically. We’ve seen this happen with our own customer support tool. The application has helped us address customer requests the faster and smarter way with its completely useful feature set.
Cassy,
Thanks for the note. Feel free to send me news as it surfaces, joe [at] NineLivesMediaInc [dot] com.
-jp