Monday, October 7, 2013

Clients do not know what we are doing for them

First awareness of your service: 

Since you are doing such a good job as an MSP you basically disappear. You meet the client quarterly, the technicians are not seen very often, all the issues in the ticketing system are solved quickly. That is why you are hired..
However, after a while it may pose a possible risk as they do not experience that you are "working". It has nothing to do with reports and such things; they are just not in a position to be able to judge the amount of work and your level of commitment to ensure that their system is up and running.

Second expectation:

As you may have realized, building up the service offeringsof a solid MSP is not an easy task. It took years to build, optimize with all of the trials and errors. That is why you have a full expertise in this field. But your client knows very little about what you are doing. They are expecting the results, and they do not really understand how and why it is working. But again, they have expectations. These expectations have nothing to do with the services they have ordered. They did not order the service; they ordered the results, the experience you had promised. Well, they have signed the contract, but, what do you do if the CEO complains because your company has charged them 4 hours for setting up his home cinema system with the NAS at his home?

Third alignment:

If awareness and expectation are met, there is alignment. Either you can align the system from bottom up, case by case using trial and error, or, if an issue comes up you may fix the expectation or the service awareness. That is a very unpredictable and slow process. The other way to do it is from top to bottom. That means, you have to see the big picture and break it down into details. Usually, it seems impractical, so the client does not have enough patience to go through the process altogether.
The solution is a mix of both. 

But just imagine:

With ReframingYourClients you are able to
  • collect all the necessary issues that should be aligned (bottom) in a questionnaire
  • analyze it from  both parties' perspective
  • have a workshop where you are able to present the differences
  • have the conversation about how to fix misalignments in an action plan
  • set up the proper awareness and expectation to be able to set the relationship to the next level

To be aligned with the client is the first and most important step for developing a fruitful relationship. But there are further steps you can use to increase your credibility to WOW your clients all the time.



See: 

Sales techniques:

vCIO researches:

    Posted by at
    Labels: , , ,

    No comments:

    Post a Comment

    Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)