I attended a Service Leadership meeting in 2017 or 2018 where the observation was voiced that clients had become much less tolerant of mistakes. There used to be some grace extended but now one mistake was enough to start a client shopping. Everyone agreed that they were experiencing the same phenomenon. The question was asked, “What were people doing to reduce mistakes?” I was shocked that not even one of the dozen high-quality MSPs in the room had changed anything in their operations in response.
At my company, we had initiated more than a dozen initiatives around error reduction or, what we called “operationalizing quality.” These efforts were all part of our overall drive to operationally mature (OM) the business. Here are a few of the initiatives that you can explore and adopt for your business if they make sense.
Driving down the average number of techs that touch a ticket and identifying run-away tickets in real time. Clients get annoyed at talking to more than one or two techs and managing number improved CX.
Improving scheduling and pod integrity (keeping techs working only on clients assigned to their pods) by rapidly identifying available techs with the right skills who were on the client’s pod and team.
Tracking client credits and the reason for them to close this leak in the profitability bucket and improve CX. Every time we had to credit time or money against a service it was an indication that we had messed something up and inconvenienced a client. It proved to be a great source of learning and improvement. This is not as relevant for fixed price contracts, but it still helps.
We focused on real-time documentation practices for our tech team. So many good things come from this discipline [include link to other blog]. We first figured out how to measure it and then we included this metric in our tech bonus program. By doing so, we improved overall compliance to almost 90% and eliminated the daily and weekly friction of hounding techs to perform in this area.
We created a Tech Go Board that automatically drew data from our documentation system, PSA, RMM, BDR, and anti-malware apps to create a list of all the important, but not urgent, items that required onsite attention. Whenever a tech was onsite for other reasons, they would reference this Go Board to do all these items as well.
We added aging and completion metrics to our documentation system so that data could be scored for freshness and completeness. We added this metric to our bonus program as well.
We already had an MSP dashboard that scored compliance with our standards for BDR, malware and patching. But we created teams of NOC and field techs and made them responsible for these scores for the clients they were assigned to. The quality metric was also added to their bonus program to align everyone around doing the nitty gritty work of keeping our clients protected and secure.
We added client recommendations to our client portal with dating and an auditing trail so a client could not unfairly accuse us of failing to make critical recommendations. There was certainly some CYA in this, but it did buy us 2nd chances in some cases.
All these efforts, and more, resulted in significant reductions in client issues and improved client and employee satisfaction. An additional huge benefit was that it provided provable points of differentiation from our competitors and accelerated our growth.
All these items, including the bonus program and client portal, and many more are contained in our FrictionlessIT software. We have already walked this path to operational maturity and can help you do the same. And you will not have to endure all the trial-and-error learning we did along the way.
