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Continuous Improvements
On Tuesday, March 31, 2009
by Lane Smith
Last month I made my first of many trips this year to get out and visit our partners in person. I am doing this to better understand our partners' needs, see where they need help from us and see where we need help from them. In speaking with one particular partner we were discussing how to articulate the value of a managed service relationship to a prospective customer. We generally focus our marketing efforts around a message of how proactive support results in decreased downtime, increased productivity and therefore increased profitability. He mentioned that he was having a lot of success with a message focused more on "continuous improvement". That struck a chord for me as this is certainly a foundation of any successful ongoing relationship with your customers; and in fact I was sitting at his office in an effort to continuously improve our services.
This leads me to my last discussion on the three topics I read about in that Inc. Magazine article. They made these recommendations to businesses looking to outsource: 1) research the vendor, 2) get a solid contract, and 3) keep tabs on the vendor. I discussed topics 1 and 2 in our last couple newsletters, which you can view here. When it comes to keeping tabs on the vendor (YOU) I suggest that you force the customer to keep tabs on you. So how exactly do you force a customer to keep tabs on you? Easy, schedule a monthly meeting with them to discuss your relationship.
While the Managed Service industry likes to refer to these meetings as QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews), we refer to them as CBRs (Customer Business Reviews). Why the change in wording? We have found that quarterly is quite a long time between meetings and that without meeting on a more regular basis with your customer you will have a difficult time keeping in touch with their needs. I hear many arguments against meeting monthly: the customer is too small, we don't have enough resources, etc. My response to these would be, if the customer is too small then why are they a customer? If you don't have enough resources then how can you possibly hold up your end of the relationship anyway? Did you price the solution too low? I recommend that you actually include a couple hours per month of billable time in their monthly fixed fee to cover the time that these meetings are going to take. Without this it is easy to say that you don't have the time, but the reality is that this meeting is what is going to keep the customer renewing your contracts in the coming years.
The problem with managed services is that the customer network is going to be secure and stable and as the relationship goes on they will have fewer and fewer issues. Without you there to remind the customer of all the hard work you are doing, they will start to value the relationship less and will ultimately think the grass is greener on the other side and cancel your services. Without this meeting you really are not making efforts to provide continuous improvement of your service to the customer. How could you, when you have no idea what they are doing, what they are happy with, unhappy with, etc. You really need to get out there face to face and discuss your relationship with them on a regular basis.
So what exactly do you talk about in these meetings? Well, there are the basics: review reports, discuss any outstanding issues, plan any upcoming projects, gauge their happiness with the service, etc. You should be discussing their business with them as well: are they growing, shrinking, looking at new technologies, are they planning their budget for the next year, if so do they need to replace any equipment, are they having any problems with their other vendors? Regardless of the topic, as their partner looking to continuously improve their business, you need to be there to listen to them and engage on the areas where you can help.
So how is Do IT Smarter working to continually improve our relationship with you, our partners? In addition to the fact that many of you will see Jeff and myself knocking on your doors for some in-person meetings this year, we have just signed agreements with CompuVault and F Secure to provide offsite backup and desktop antivirus to our partners and your customers. We are also working very closely with Level Platforms and now have a dedicated Partner Development Manager that will be working with those of you that are leveraging the Level Platforms solution to help you grow your business. As always our service team is continuously improving our services and we continue to add sales- and marketing-focused materials to our portal. As always I encourage you to reach out to me or anyone on our team with any issues or suggestions that you may have.
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