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Enterprise IT teams are increasingly partnering with managed service providers (MSPs) to help their organizations thrive in today’s competitive market. Service providers combine industry-specific knowledge with technology expertise to ensure the continuous availability of enterprise services. This combination helps drive faster revenue growth and greater operational efficiencies for their customers.
Since MSPs need to handle both legacy and modern workloads across their customer base, they must have the right tools, applications, processes, and teams for delivering best-in-class managed services at the right value to customers.
Here are seven best practices for modern service providers to ensure rapid customer acquisition and lasting client relationships:
1. Service Excellence
As service providers scale, they need to make sure there is no compromise on the quality of services delivered. Inconsistent service delivery can hurt customer renewals and net promoter scores (NPS).
MSPs should ensure service excellence by betting on artificial intelligence (AI), hyperautomation, and advanced data analytics to deliver managed services at scale, reduce repetitive work, and enable data-driven decision making. Service excellence will also help MSPs lower client churn, increase retention rates, and expand the share of wallet across their customers.
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2. Skill Maturity
With the adoption of agile development and DevOps practices, enterprises are increasingly able to quickly build and upgrade their applications. MSPs should take an aggressive approach to help their employees upskill and become more productive to keep up with customer expectations.
Service providers should use micro-learning training that combines topical information with short-term activities for faster acquisition and retention of knowledge. They should also fund professional boot camps and certifications in areas such as cloud, containers, DevOps, and security, so employees can master new technologies and be seen as trusted customer advisors.
3. Platform Approach
A recent survey by research firm EMA found that 64% of enterprises use between four to 10 distinct monitoring tools.
Given this tool sprawl, it is the service provider’s responsibility to deliver a centralized platform that can integrate with tools and offer unified visibility and control across hybrid environments. In this way, MSPs can transform swivel-chair IT operations to be more proactive with operations, enabling the ability to monitor and optimize distributed workloads with a platform-centric approach.
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4. Recurring Revenue Models
Service providers used to work on break-fix contracts, which required charging for ad-hoc managed services. Enterprises are increasingly shifting from reactive support to proactive managed services.
Outcome-based managed services result in the long-term alignment of interests between clients and providers, ensuring resilient infrastructure and peace of mind for customers. MSPs that embrace recurring revenue models can shift from project-based services to long-term engagements that deliver greater financial predictability, faster revenue growth, and higher customer satisfaction.
5. Branding
Investing in marketing can help customers understand a provider’s solution offerings and the specific expertise they can leverage.
MSPs should strive to continuously boost the level of awareness around their service offerings. They should educate customers around their differentiated capabilities, which will ensure long-term relationships that deliver sustained growth and overall profitability.
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6. Cloud-Ready
Customers are looking to work with service providers that can accelerate cloud migration initiatives using pre-configured assessments, packaged tools, and standardized best practices. This can help organizations drive faster innovation, reduce technical debt, and embrace disruptive business models with cloud migration and application modernization initiatives.
7. Ease of Doing Business
Organizations are tired of dealing with multiple service providers, software vendors, and equipment manufacturers that create complexity in managing, licensing, pricing, and contractual obligations. Service providers that can work with their customers to create transparent contracts across different vendors that are tailored to their needs will experience greater traction.
Managed service providers need to be more agile, flexible, and service-oriented than the IT organizations they work with. Service providers that adopt these seven best practices can help their clients innovate and meet business objectives at breakneck speeds. As a result, highly effective service providers will witness significant growth, competitive differentiation, and stickier engagements in a hyper-competitive market.
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About the Author:
Prasad Dronamraju, Solution Architect and Technical Product Marketing Manager, OpsRamp.