How the MSP Onboarding Bottleneck Affects Customer Experience

Vincent Tran

By Vincent Tran, COO, Liongard

For MSPs, onboarding new clients can be a time-consuming, week-long endeavor. Currently, MSPs spend about 40 to 80 hours manually entering information from existing systems and databases to onboard each client, overseeing everything from Office 365 accounts to Cisco router configurations.

This drawn-out process can often affect the customer experience by starting things off on the wrong foot. As MSPs are still performing onboarding tasks, many times tickets already have started rolling into the help desk: It’s never good to start off behind in a new job.

The resulting bottleneck can cause irreversible damage to customer confidence, ruining a fruitful relationship before it even begins. MSPs need to focus on customer experience from the beginning to ensure they build customers’ trust and demonstrate fast time-to-value by avoiding wasted time in the onboarding process.

Underestimating a Client Environment

MSPs work with a broad range of clients. Before beginning the onboarding process, it’s essential for them to fully understand what precisely the client does, how they do it and what products they use to best serve them. Underestimating the client’s environment is one of the main factors resulting in an onboarding bottleneck.

You also need to consider things that could possibly go wrong. Discovery tools will sometimes miss half the client environment – you will need to be thorough and plan for the worst. Sometimes, existing tools may miss items such as printers. If you miss out on these items, you need to be prepared to lose time going back in to update documentation.

As with much of life, money needs to be discussed before starting onboarding, as clients are often concerned about onboarding costs. It’s important for everyone to be on the same page. While it may be challenging, it’s important to reduce client onboarding costs to stay competitive with the hordes of other MSPs out there. Gaining the customer’s trust through positive customer experiences is the best way to achieve lasting success and avoid an unnecessary bottleneck in the beginning.

Clients who have spent years working with traditional one-off IT companies (project-based work) can expect a marked improvement in services if they turn to an MSP. New customers transitioning to a managed service contract must be supported virtually on the day they sign – and no later. To do this, it’s important to have information on their environment ahead of time, and establish a baseline in a system of record to ensure a smooth transition. Ultimately, your goal is to reduce IT pain. Understanding the environment ahead of time and then onboarding quickly is key to a successful MSP transition.

Standardizing Client Environment

People are naturally resistant to changing their IT systems. This is a challenge when an MSP’s core competencies are run on different technology than that used by the new customer. By letting the potential client know the technology road map, and setting expectations that there may be issues early on, you will have set yourself up for the best chance at success.

Prospective customers may not want to change systems or refuse to do so because of cost-driven or emotional reasons. It’s essential to show them in explicit detail the benefits of switching to your offering. Your assessment could include the risks they have today and what that could mean to them in financial terms.

Before onboarding them, you need to get your clients to …