What Does It Take to Manage the Enterprise Customer Relationship?
Selling to enterprises can be a huge driver of growth for managed services providers (MSPs).
A recent survey of nearly 400 managed service providers conducted by remote monitoring and management (RMM) software company Kaseya, found a majority of respondents experienced strong growth over the past year.
Kaseya’s “2016 MSP Global Pricing Survey,” released in January, indicated most MSPs increased revenue from many of the offerings in their portfolios during the last year.
The survey also showed that the MSP market “continues to grow at a healthy rate,” according to Kaseya.
Such positive trends usually aren’t an accident, experts say.
“It turns out that the most successful MSPs follow the same model for their customers,” Miguel Lopez, Kaseya’s senior vice president and general manager of MSPs, said in a statement.
How an MSP fosters relationships with enterprises can have a significant impact on its growth.
Business consulting firm Customer Centricity noted that an MSP must focus on four organizational groups to manage its enterprise customer relationships effectively:
- Sales representative/account manager — Works with an enterprise customer to ensure its IT needs are fulfilled.
- Customer service/technical support — Serves as a point of contact and responds to an enterprise customer’s IT issues.
- Business manager/decision-maker — Controls the budget and focuses on reducing an enterprise’s IT costs.
- End user/technical contact — Reaches out to an MSP for technical assistance.
Customer Centricity said recognizing the dynamics at play between these groups will help an MSP “properly align its resources to manage the customer’s whole experience.”
In addition, proper resource management may help an MSP improve its communications with an enterprise customer.
“If you are in charge of managing an enterprise customer relationship, you certainly have had the unpleasant opportunity to deliver less than stellar news to a client,” Customer Centricity wrote in a white paper. “Perhaps it was a broken promise or a missed performance level. Your ability to properly communicate this information to the customer will determine if you maintain credibility with the client or not.”
How do you manage enterprise customer relationships? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at [email protected].
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