Smart MSPs Study Their Net Promoter Scores

How do savvy managed services providers drive growth while improving customer satisfaction? One answer involves the tried-but-true Net Promoter score survey. Just ask CSK Technologies, which hopes to drive its Net Promoter score above 70 percent — well above the 60 percent net promoter score that most reasonably successful companies attain. Here’s some background.

CSK surveys 25 percent of its clients at the end of each fiscal quarter. The company doesn’t close a service record until either (A) the customer completes the survey or (B) 72 hours after a survey invite is sent but not completed. CSK is currently in the process of calculating its score, which is done both corporately and per individual company employee.

“Most companies are focused on getting bigger,” says Paul Sponcia, Partner and CEO of the IT service and support company CSK Technologies. “We focus on getting better and improving in every area of our business from top to bottom. The market will then demand that we get bigger.”

It’s a logical stream of thought that has driven Sponcia’s career from working in the IT department of a construction company in 1992, to founder of his own IT company in 1998, to working as an MSP consultant for the past two years. Sponcia is a familiar name within MSP circles; he previously led Knoxville, Tenn.-based RM Technologies Group, which later became Claris Networks.

Sponcia joined the CSK team in late 2010 because he was looking to enter the cloud space with clear goals in mind: client acquisition and growth, and more recurring revenue. Specifically, Sponcia wants to help CSK generate $2 million in revenue in 2011 and plans to ultimately make CSK Technologies a $5 million company in the next two years.

Eager to align customer satisfaction with potential growth opportunities, the CSK customer survey asks just three questions:

• Based on your experience with CSK how likely would you be to recommend us to someone else on a scale of 0-10 — 10 being the highest?
• If you answered less than eight would you mind telling us why?
• Would you like to be contacted regarding your answer?

Admittedly, the survey isn’t unique. Thousands of enterprise organizations leverage Net Promoter scores to examine their performance and potentially bolster their success. But CSK offers a timely reminder that Net Promoter scores can also help small businesses.

“We want the onus to be on us to perform,” said Sponcia when describing the contractual obligations that CSK and its clients have to one another. The majority of the contracts customers sign are three years, but unsatisfied clients can get out of that contract at any time if they are unsatisfied with the service, as long as CSK can get out of the service agreement they have with the developers of the applications.

And as for the cost of the company’s healthcare IT services, IT consulting, cloud services and EMR solutions, Sponcia had a most appropriate analogy: “We’re like the Southwest Airlines of Cloud Computing,” he joked. “We try to give our clients a dependable and useful service at a low cost.”

No doubt, Sponcia’s main focus throughout 2011 will be the growth of CSK Technologies. But he’s also keeping a close eye on emerging market opportunities. “I’m working on a business incubator with a partner to incubate business ideas coming out of second tier universities,” he said. We’ll be watching Sponcia’s progress on the CSK and incubator fronts.

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