How the MSP Onboarding Bottleneck Affects Customer Experience

… buy into using your preferred system to reduce wasted time. At the very least, the onboarding process should include the path to get them up to your company’s MSP standards. They will be infinitely easier to support because they have commonalities with other customers. MSPs should be clear with their intentions, explaining to customer the benefits of a standardized system stack. If the potential customer doesn’t want to make the switch or doesn’t see the benefits you outline, sometimes the MSP needs to leave the deal on the table.

If you accede to new customers that don’t want to standardize, you’re opening yourself up to unfamiliar tools and environments that will ultimately drain your resources. When do you draw the line? When your MSP is first starting out, it may be almost impossible to turn away a customer that isn’t the right fit. However, once the business has matured and has the self-knowledge and processes to know the customer that is indeed the best fit for your offering, you’ll understand when to say no. For example, you may have difficulty onboarding clients in niche industries such as legal practices or accounting firms. But if they end up being your core customer base, your processes and standards will be molded to these industries.

Service providers that standardize already have a faster and smoother onboarding process. While customers may push back at standardization, point out that they will have a quality customer experience in the long run.

Outside of MSPs, standardization has proven to be beneficial in reducing costs for a variety of companies. Look no further than Southwest airlines, which uses the same plane, processes and nearly everything else to reduce costs.

Onboarding: Documentation Counts

There’s nothing worse than having to repeat something that already was completed. When onboarding is done incorrectly, you run the risk of having to do it all over again – and if everything about the customer environment wasn’t written down, you could be starting again at square one.

Without proper documentation of the environment at onboarding or only documenting things half-way, your company runs the risk of post-onboarding pain. The need for documentation is often an underappreciated part of the onboarding process, especially as the customer probably will never see the documentation. You also need to keep their documentation current. If not, you risk increasing your bottleneck with time wasted on “re-onboarding” throughout the partnership.

Changes are constant and companies could be back at square one again easily. Consistently updating the customer environment is essential to avoid frustration. For example, when a technician has to go in and identify an issue, it’s essential for them to document this for future reference. If this step is missed, it will lead to future cases of re-onboarding bottlenecks.

The struggle to break through bottlenecks is a challenge in any field. For MSPs, it often kills a relationship with a customer before it even begins. Using automated tools to document changes in their systems and carefully pre-planning the transfer can reduce the onboarding experience to several hours. That streamlining smooths the onboarding bottleneck and provides the best possible customer experience.

Vincent Tran, CISSP, is COO at Liongard, an automation platform that enables MSPs with visibility beyond the endpoint and into critical on-premises apps, the network stack and cloud services. Follow him on LinkedIn or @LiongardHQ.