MSPs must give customers a fair report

The argument for better reporting as put by Mark Banfield

If you're providing IT as a service, and expect customers to pay a monthly fee, it's only natural they will want to know "how are you performing for me?"

In today's competitive channel, most IT providers claim to offer SLAs. However, if two MSPs are bidding for the same piece of business with similar pricing and with SLAs, what's to differentiate them in customer eyes?

Odds are the customer will choose the company with customer reports for the previous 12 months, demonstrating that it can meet the promised service levels.

MSPs that cannot provide basic metrics around their SLAs will struggle to compete. And accurate reporting will only become more complicated as MSPs and customers mix and match on-premise, SaaS, hosted and cloud offerings.

Some MSPs are unable to provide their customers with the information they need because they use disparate systems, complicating the tracking and reporting. For example, a service desk system for booking their ticketing, while tracking the time their technicians spend on the helpdesk with a separate product.

So it becomes much more difficult for customers to decide how to evolve their IT estate.

Do you know how profitable your managed services contracts are? Do you know what your utilisation rates are? Do you know how well you're meeting the SLAs? Do you know whether you're under or over-serving your clients? Do you know exactly where you're spending time on different types of equipment and how much the support costs?

How do your customers and their staff feel about your service?

Many MSPs may struggle to answer these questions, even though they are fundamental to running a managed services business.

Accurate and detailed reporting on customer business processes can help secure your own position in an ever-more complex ecosystem of technologies and providers.

It can also be key to further sales and more effective management of customer IT. Why would you work in the dark?

Mark Banfield is vice president of international business at Autotask