Peter Karlson is the founder of NeuEon, a company focused on business and technology transformation.
In the first article of this series, we looked at the basics of a managed services provider (MSP) and how they can help your organization lower operational costs and deliver high-quality IT services to your end users without you having to hire, train and equip technical staff. That all sounds wonderful until it isn’t. MSPs fail to meet their promises and clients’ expectations for several reasons.
Communications
While many MSPs over-communicate during the sales process, their communication cadence and interest may wane after signing the contract. We have seen the weekly, monthly and quarterly meetings drop to “every once in a while” on many occasions.
This excursion can be due to several factors, including staff turnover, account fatigue or poor management. Another element of communication breakdown is just the language that MSPs use to communicate with their clients.
There are dozens of TLAs (three-letter acronyms) tossed around in every email, ticket and meeting with an MSP, and yes, I just used a TLA. Information technology is a jargon-filled industry, and folks on the client side may not have the technical background or interest to constantly interpret the language, further widening the communication gap between the MSP and your organization.
Inconsistent Service Delivery
Another challenge with MSPs is getting consistent service delivery. Several factors inside the MSP can cause this issue. The first is only sometimes true of all MSPs, but many have high turnover rates among their frontline staff.
This fact causes internal communications to lag in the time it takes to understand the context of a newly opened ticket, any organizational nuances and specific personnel/personality/communication differences and then resolve the issue. This lag manifests itself as “poor customer service” and the MSP getting dinged on their customer satisfaction scores.
Another element of poor service delivery is a lack of familiarity with specific technologies. For example, it could be a technology adjacent to standard applications like SharePoint or a widely used but poorly supported one like SalesForce. Some clients expect the helpdesk staff to know something about everything that has an on-switch or operating system or is accessible via a browser window.
Security, Compliance And Coordination
Some MSPs handle everything from desktop support to security operations, also playing the part of a managed security service provider (MSSP) to throw in a four-letter acronym to keep you on your toes. Those pure MSPs sometimes get into finger-pointing with their MSSP counterparts regarding ownership of an issue.
For example, someone may open a ticket with the help desk for trouble accessing a website. When the technician investigates, it is a firewall issue, so the security operations team may have to handle it. If that is a different company, this leads to a fair amount of delay in providing closure to the user who reported the issue in the first place.
This coordination issue is further exacerbated when there is not a regular touchpoint with the three key stakeholders: the customer, the MSP and the MSSP.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I can give quite a few other anecdotal examples, but I want to get to the solutions before everyone starts rethinking their decision to hire an MSP. We use a few best practices when trying to keep the relationship between our client and the MSP productive and focused on providing value to the end-users.
Our first recommendation is to return to the basic cadence of update meetings:
• Weekly: The weekly meeting should be a quick, no more than a thirty-minute review of the tickets that came in for the last seven days. This is a way to prevent any issues that are not being addressed properly from festering.
• Monthly: The monthly meeting is a longer meeting, a minimum of one hour, to review the metrics that you have established that are important to your organization and customer satisfaction survey results to look for any trends or patterns that may be emerging in the data. Patterns like specific users, departments and applications are more prevalent than others. These may need special attention, like training or process improvement. This is also a good time to look at any variances from the service level agreements. One month does not make a trend, but by keeping the SLA top of mind, it will remind the MSP that you are looking at the numbers. If there are multiple vendors in the mix, it is imperative that they all show up for these sessions since they have a joint responsibility for making you, the customer, happy.
• Quarterly: On a quarterly basis, it can be more of a true quarterly business review (QBR) where you can look at the bigger picture and relationship between your organization and the MSP specifically to focus on alignment of your business goals with the service levels that have been agreed to.
Stick To Business Value
MSPs will often recommend that you move to the latest and greatest or a new service they’re offering. However, it has been our experience that when we ask the MSP to come back with a business value presentation to explain the benefits that the company will get from this new service or technology, it often does not make sense to pursue the upgrade at that point in time. However, if the MSP can prove the benefits outweigh the cost of the implementation and the ongoing expense, then we can make a business decision on the move.
So, as you can see, there are challenges with all vendor relationships, but they get especially sticky when they involve technology and your end-users. I will cover the next step in the process, identifying the root causes of the failure and what to do if we have to replace the vendor in a future article.
All that being said, if you have any questions or comments or need ideas for better ways to provide oversight and management of technologies, please reach out to me.
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