By Capzure Guest Blog

Many IT service providers state their top business challenge is acquiring new customers. According to MarketingWizdom*, “The average business loses around 20 percent of its customers annually simply by failing to attend to customer relationships.” The key to securing your business may not be the latest marketing craze or social media strategy; it may just be making your current customers very happy. And, once you’ve nailed that down, you can focus your efforts externally on marketing and sales.

Here are two things you should start doing today to create a culture of support so that your employees will go the extra mile to delight a customer even when you are not around.

1. Communicate the value of support.

If support is not communicated as a company priority and given value (which can be praise and rewards), then you can forget the rest of this information and just start there. There are a 100 micro-decisions that everyone makes every day that are guided by something deeper than process. People will shift their energy toward what they value and what the company values. If technicians who deliver great support are praised, rewarded or promoted, then you are going to drive a culture of support. If other qualities are valued, like efficiency and cost-cutting, then people will find out how to cut corners even if it is at the cost of customer satisfaction.

2. Give employees the resources they need.

It is one thing to say that you value support, but you truly demonstrate it when you put your time and money where your mouth is. By investing in support resources you are proving to your employees what the company priorities are. This means no more Excel spreadsheets or manual processes to track tickets.

There are numerous cloud-based service management solutions out there that are affordable and easy to use. Ticket management, time tracking and customer portals can free up hours per month for each technician, meaning your minimal investment actually pays for itself and more.

What’s in it for you?

As the business owner, you need to know there will be real impact for any investment you make. Service management software is different than ticketing management because it helps with the one thing that matters most to the business: revenue. Tracking time is great, but being able to create invoices and connect them to your accounting software is what is going to save you real time–and ensure that you capture the revenue you need.

A culture of support comes from the top. When employees can see that you value support by what you say and what tools you invest in, they will go the extra mile. This improves all of your customer relationships (and, of course, it doesn’t hurt that it saves you hours a month on invoicing).

^{*“20 Customer Retention Strategies”, MarketingWizdom. Accessed 2015-06-26, Available at:} http://marketingwizdom.com/strategies/retention-strategies

As the Founder and President of a national IT service provider serving clients for more than 15 years, Paul Norwood walks the walk of the typical MSP owner. Having experienced first-hand the need for a simple, unified platform to manage time, tickets and billing, he rejected the software industry’s heavy-handed approach and co-founded Capzure as a company that is easy for MSPs to do business with, on every level. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.

About Capzure

Capzure is a SaaS company that is transforming the way IT service providers track and bill consultant time in today’s multi-channel client environments. Capzure’s creators set out to build the software they could never find to run their own IT managed services business, one designed especially for independent, mid-size IT service companies.