Enhancing your MSPs Customer Experience (CX)

So, hey guys, and welcome to today's webinar — if I can figure out how to get to the next slide. Yep, I always stuff this up, sorry. There we go. Today's MSPs in Conversation is Enhancing your MSP's Customer Experience. So welcome, and welcome to our panelists. We'll get you guys to introduce yourselves in a second, but thank you for joining us.

A little bit of housekeeping today. All qualified MSPs are entitled to an MSA Uber Eats voucher, so enjoy lunch on us. If you haven't already got that voucher, our team is standing by, so send us a message in the chat and we will sort that out for you.

A little bit about who Hosted Network is, if you don't already know. We are a wholesale cloud and telco provider for Australian MSPs. Why we're a little bit different is that we started as an MSP ourselves, so we get the pain points right. Without going into all the details of our services, as a basic example, if you've got an NBN service, we understand that that might be underpinning a much larger MSP contract, and we're there to have your back basically. That's what we've built a business on, and we're very, very big on partner experience, which is why today's topic is on customer experience.

So today's session will be recorded. It will be available on our Vimeo and YouTube channels, so if you want to re-watch it, feel free. But panelists, thank you for joining us today.

Meet the Panelists

So we've got Jamie, James and Bradley. Jamie, can I get you to introduce yourself?

Well, firstly, thanks Ben for having me. Wonderful job on this webinar series. My name's Jamie Warner, CEO of Invarasoft and also CEO of MSP e-nerds based in Sydney. So I've been running that MSP for 22 years. I started when I was 22, so now you all know how old I am, and so it's been my lifetime, the whole MSP industry, and more recently, with Invarasoft, learning the whole vendor ropes and what it's like to actually build a software business. All of that, the software side of things, is all around customer experience, and we've built a unified customer experience platform now. But very passionate obviously about this topic, and looking forward to hearing a lot of the feedback from the other panelists as well. So thanks again for having me.

Thank you. James, you're a regular guest, but your title has changed recently, so let's introduce you again.

Yes. James Davis. I'm now a Director of Academy of ANZ for Pax8. A lot of people wouldn't know me from C-level inside Pax8 to create an academy that's all about partner education and helping the industry. I want to share some of my experience from the MSP world, but doing the coaching business, and even my past experience of being in the trades as well, of how do we do better client experiences and what that might look like.

And Bradley, first-time panelist with us. Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I'm Bradley Kaine. I'm the CEO of an MSP based in Melbourne. We're called Kaine Mathrick Tech, or KM Tech. Hopefully you can see the branding there — we're all about brand. We are a real customer service, customer experience centric MSP. We always have been. Hopefully I can add value today and share a bit about the journey and how we do it. We're a reasonable size MSP and growing, based out of Melbourne.

Fantastic. Well, today's topic — I'll stop sharing in a second — enhancing your MSP's customer experience. Kind of like Jamie mentioned, this is a topic very close to our heart as well. We are all about partner experience at Hosted Network, so I'm particularly excited about this. Hopefully we'll learn a thing or two as well, so I've got my pen and paper ready to take some notes.

We call partner experience a little bit different — customer experience. You guys are our customers, right? We call it PEX. For us, if I think of the turning point of where Hosted Network really took off, it was when we recognized and really made partner experience our ethos. For us, customer experience, partner experience, whatever you want to call it, is what we validate all of our decisions and changes within our business. Whether that be a support ticket, whether that be a sales process or whatnot, if we're looking at improving something or implementing a new system, it's what we use to validate it. It's, hey, how is that going to impact partner experience? And we don't always get it right, but it's something for us that has really enabled our whole team to get behind it. It's not just me as the CEO turning around and saying, hey, we're going to do this because it's going to be a great partner experience. No, it allows everyone in our team to validate their own decision making for partner experience. So very, very excited about today. That's why we're talking about it. But let me stop sharing — I can find my mouse, too many monitors, like all good IT guys.

What Customer Experience Actually Means

All right, so I might start with you, James. I've got Jamie and James — I'm going to have to be very specific today, sorry. So James, in your words, what is customer experience?

I think it's as simple as creating a journey for the engagement of what we're delivering and what we're providing to our clients in a method that they appreciate and get the best value out of our ongoing relationship. I think it's as simple as that. And they can change depending on the business culture, the types of things we're doing and delivering to clients, and what they're paying for as well. And marrying up those expectations of what they have and exceeding it a lot of the time — that should be the aim.

Exactly like what you said. Okay. So Jamie, do you want to — I guess for your side, I mean, you come from both MSP and a vendor targeting MSPs to improve customer experience, right? So you're kind of looking at it from two different angles. Why do you see, as a vendor but also as an MSP, why is partner experience important? So not just what it is, but why is it important?

Well, firstly, I want to say this is one of the first webinars that hasn't been done by Invarasoft around customer experience. It's such a new term, and I think those listening need to understand that. Even CX and talking about CX is new. When we launched our product, it probably fell with a bit of a thud, to be honest, at the start, because we didn't even know that it was probably termed a customer experience category. We were quite confused around the terminology. So the first thing to understand is that customer experience as a concept is very mature in enterprise, right — like the Zendesks and these sorts of companies in the ticketing world. But just in general, customer experience is a massive topic. But if you still to this day ask a lot of MSPs what CX means, they will go, I don't know, I don't know what it means. So I think if you were to ask a lot of MSPs, well, what does customer experience mean, there's probably going to be a lot of confusion. Someone like James, who coaches, is going to be quite well aware of that. Someone like Bradley, who scaled a great MSP to a large size, is going to be aware of it. But a lot of MSPs aren't aware of it.

So when I talk to people about it, the first thing I'll say is, guys, as an MSP, we are not technology businesses. We are essentially customer service businesses in technology. And even when you're hiring staff, that needs to be made abundantly clear to the staff that you bring on board, depending on the role — certainly service desk, anyone interacting with the customer. Understanding that you tend to only lose clients in an MSP when you stuff up the relationship side of things. If you're not getting along with people, it's not usually when you've done a bad job on the technical side of things. So the first thing I would say is that we are customer service businesses in technology. And if that's the case, wouldn't it make sense to focus on the customer experience? And that is the sort of thing that will unravel today, because I could go on and on about that, but that's probably the first point to understand, and really deeply.

Do you lie in bed at night pontificating on how you could improve all the areas of your MSP from that customer experience piece? Obviously there's technology pieces you can do, but just even process and procedure, your onboarding experience, your projects experience — just everything about it. It sort of is the DNA. And the last thing I'll say is that if you actually look on Wikipedia for the definition of customer experience, they talk about it being the interaction between a customer and an organization over the lifetime of that relationship. I wrote it down, or at least I took a screenshot of it, because then it goes on to say — and this is really interesting, and I'll leave you on this point — that the interaction is made up of three parts: the customer journey, the brand touch points the customer interacts with, and then the environments the customer experiences during that experience, so physical or digital.

Most MSPs, when they're interacting with customers, the first time you meet them is in a sales sense. You then have engineers that may go on site and do projects and that type of thing, but then that stops for quite a long period of time, and it's just an engineer maybe coming in with a laptop. Really, the vast experience that a customer has of an MSP, if you haven't really thought about it, is over the phone — it's over the phone and on email. So when you think about how we're going to market as MSPs, I don't think it's very modern, and I think we can learn a lot from consumer technology. So there's a few thoughts about the whole customer experience definition and what it all means.

Fantastic. Okay. So Bradley, Jamie's kind of covered why he says it's important, but maybe you can put your own spin on it, from your perspective within your MSP — the success that you guys have seen, how has it all enabled you to reach that success?

Yeah. I said at the start, well before this session, that I've heard Jamie speak a couple of years ago and I was nodding the whole time in the session. Everything he said is 100% right. I think if you're asking why we've been so successful in growth and retaining — it's our biggest factor for growth in the business, client retention. There's a lot of work that goes into attracting a new prospect and going in and talking to them and building that credibility and selling to them. We've always put all our time and effort and focus into the service desk and the customer service element of that, to make sure — because that's where you live and breathe. Oh, sorry, that's where you live and die, I reckon, by the sword, in terms of client retention. You can do great projects, you can be a great technologist, but if you don't do all that day-to-day stuff, it's when you get this swell of complaints from a client where, especially the decision makers go, hey, all the staff are complaining about the service — that's where you lose a client. If you've got that part right, the byproduct of that is you still do all their projects and you sell them all the kit and all the other bits and pieces. So that's been our number one factor from day one. We said we're going to go through all this process to sell to new clients and attract them, but if we can keep them and grow those clients, then that's what we've done.

The main reason, as Jamie said at the start — Scott, my business partner, said very early on, we're in customer service. And saying it is one thing, and then working out how you live and breathe and how it becomes true is another. So we've gone through all sorts of iterations. Early days, just a small team of techs, being really high touch. I remember sitting there when there was seven of us, and we had awesome times — it was a bit of a boys' club, though. We sat there and every call, everything that came through was just done in such a short period of time. We've grown a lot — over 60 staff now — so you can't always do that. But customer experience started as that, and then it was adding a customer service person on the phone so that there was more of a customer service element, right through to today where we've gone through a whole rebrand. Brand is massively important. Your culture is massively important as well. Your team live and breathe — your core values should be wrapped around this.

We went through a whole process around mapping out the customer journey and how we delight the client right through that process. So everything from when they see us, they see our brand. If you go to our website and look at the way we present ourselves, we do that on purpose. We had to go through a whole process of stakeholder interviews with external clients and our staff, and asking, hey, why did you come to us and why do you keep partnering with them? And all that messaging is basically the words of our clients who are saying so. So the brand's important. If someone goes and sees us, they see us in a certain way. If we have our first meeting with them, we follow a process. That customer journey from that point right through — through to selling, to the onboarding. The way we onboard clients, we've got onboarding portals and process that we follow. We even use HubSpot and tools like that to actually target the users and give them information about what to expect and what's happening with this change to the new MSP. Right through everything, like the way we do our SBRs, their strategic business reviews, and the project work and all that. There's a lot of work in that, but you've got to look at the whole journey over time when you mature. I think early days it's just being as high touch as you can, but as you mature — that's what we've done. We've realized how important brand is and that whole customer journey, and we're still working on it. It's not perfect, but we're still working on it actively. So that's kind of a broad thing of what we're doing to keep those clients and to continue to attract and grow.

Your Website and the Sales Process as First Impressions

I'll just jump in there if it's all right. There's a couple of things that I've noticed, because with the vendor side, when I was doing the MSP thing, I had no MSP mates, didn't speak to anybody. As a vendor you're now speaking to hundreds of them. What Bradley was saying — I'll just expand a little bit more about this — I'll have two points. The first point is your website. If you go and have a look at Bradley's website, what you're experiencing when you look at it is his culture and the people. The imagery that he actually uses will be his staff and his company. Now some people go, but I've only got two staff, it's just me. Okay, so you need to a little bit. But the fact is, it's real people, real images, office pictures and this type of thing. What have I observed, speaking to hundreds of MSPs all around the world in all the different countries? They use stock imagery, and it's not even of people. So with that first experience, when you go to an MSP's website and you're seeing this kind of stock imagery — maybe even servers and just kind of weird stuff going on there — it looks like it's just being picked off a template and thrown on the internet. Now, if we're all about customer service, if we're a customer service business, and someone looking to find a new partner is essentially looking for a new partnership, and they can't visually see people and a relationship kind of vibe going on from that website, it's not the sort of thing that jumps out to them to go, oh, that looks like the sort of company I'd like to partner with, because I can kind of see the people. So think about that. Have a look at your own website and tell me whether that first banner that's there is a stock image or is it an image of your office and your staff. Bradley does an amazing job of that. We try and do that at e-nerds as well, and it works, because people buy from people.

The second thing — and Bradley said it, I'll just expand on it a bit — is the sales process is the first customer experience. Do you call them back straight away? Do you book that meeting straight away? Do you have a structured sort of playbook there? Most MSPs don't. They kind of barely get the phone call back. That's the first experience. I'll give you an example. We won a $3,000-a-month deal a couple of years ago, and I would like to think that it was because we've put a lot of effort into the way we present and all that sort of stuff. At the time I thought that's why we won. But you know why we won? The company went, oh, I'll ring up ten MSPs. Actually, ten — I don't know who does ten, that's ridiculous, normally it's three — but they did ten, and then they just put the feelers out. One person called back, one person emailed back the next day, and the rest didn't. Who do you think called back same day, within an hour? We did. And then it was only later, after we won the deal — I mean, it was a gimme deal because pretty much no one responded — that's customer experience. So, competitive advantage in customer experience: when you're the only one to answer the phone.

Merrill from our team has actually said consistency is key, and I think your point about the sales process being the very first step — if you're going to go out and see someone, they see you on the website, they have that consistent experience. So that's a nice easy low-hanging fruit that the MSPs on the call can take away.

When Customer Experience Starts to Matter for Smaller MSPs

James, now we talked about this last week. Bradley and Jamie, they're at a particular size — brother, you're at 60, Jamie, you're at 50 or so MSP head count — so you're a sizable MSP. You've got a team of people to look after things. Hopefully you're not answering every single phone call anymore. But James, we talked about this for the smaller guys. Even if you are a one-man band, or you're setting out, at what point does customer experience matter, and is it just another stress point? We talk about all these ideas on these MSPs in Conversation, and when you're a smaller MSP there's only so many hours in the day. So at what size does it matter? When should I actually start to worry about customer experience?

It's pretty simple. As soon as you've got a business, the client experience matters. And if you're not focused on that, then you're already behind the eight ball. Like Brad and Jamie have pointed out, there are some of their steps as they're growing, and when you're a bit smaller it's more about — you can just be really responsive on the help desk, and that's all that matters, and the touch point on the sales engagement. A lot of this stuff is super basic. The level that Jamie and Brad are at, they need to be, for the size of business — this is how you drive growth. But it all starts from understanding what the client's needs and wants are and how we're going to deliver it, and that starts from when we take that first step as a business owner.

My experience — I'll go back to when I was in the trade services, doing gardening and carpentry and things like that, and take it out of MSP. I built a million-dollar business in 14 months by doing simple client experience stuff like Jamie just said. I'd answer the phone, I'd book a call, I'd rock up on time, I'd be well-dressed, I could charge double what everyone else was doing, and I'd win the work just from doing some basic things and understanding what the client wanted and needed, and then being able to deliver the job and then have a follow-up, make sure that they were happy with the job, that was better than the rest of the market. None of that was complex, and that was a simple client journey, and I got lots of referral business and lots of recurring business just from doing that simply. So it doesn't need to start at the big branding point and have all these systems and technologies at all. Start by understanding what's the culture of my business, and that flows from the owner, and then flowing that through to showing the people involved.

I love what Jamie and Brad have both said around we're a people business, not that deals with technology — not a technology business first. That's where we all get the same mistakes over and over again. And I'll reiterate what Jamie was saying: go look at every MSP's website. Everyone looks the same, everyone says the same thing, and we're all struggling to convey any type of value to our clients. I wonder why. There's no connection. It's very hot and we're struggling to get leads, and it's because we're not differentiating ourselves, and we're not focused on what the client wants and needs at this point. So, starting simple, one person — you can scale from there.

Okay. We've got a comment from Edwin in the chat that the majority of customers would rather a great customer experience without their problem being solved. And I tend to agree, right? I mean, at the end of the day, if you just communicate — communication, it's simple, but it's hard to do in some cases. But picking up the phone, calling back, or hey, we're working on these things. So yeah, I completely agree. Edwin, I know that back when we ran our MSP, we would often just try and get the tickets done, but in a lot of cases we didn't actually need to. We had other things — we could have just said, hey, yep, no worries, set their expectations, made sure we were prioritizing the things that needed to be prioritized, rather than just trying to do everything at once. And that's something back in the early days that we just kept on hitting our head against the table — we didn't understand. I mean, going many, many years back. And it was, like I said at the beginning of this webinar, for us as a business when we realized that. We didn't realize that at the beginning, and this is what these MSPs in Conversation are all about: learning from our stupid mistakes, and some of them are that. And that's okay, we all make those and we all learn along the way.

Practical Tips to Improve Customer Experience

So moving on though, let's talk about some practical tips. We kind of want to give some light bulb moments away. We've touched on a couple of things — adding and making sure that we've got our people on the actual website, making sure that we've got a human element to it. Jamie, what are some of the things — and I'm kind of expecting you to have a whole bunch of things — how do we improve customer experience? You can totally shout out Invarasoft here, go for gold.

Well, yeah, I will do that. But the first thing is, by always selling. ABC's, yeah. The one thing I've been observing — I alluded to the fact, well, I said at the start that CX is still quite a new thing. It's been somewhat of a frustration when you flip around and then start trying to sell something around CX to people. I've had a lot of time to sort of think about why that is. For most people on this call — I don't know where Bradley sits on this, what I'm about to say — but most MSP business owners are technical, and they spend all their time worrying about flashing lights and technical, and when they look at growth and sales and that sort of stuff, potentially it's not their forte. So they actually sort of default to, excellent customer experience is doing my job of fixing your problem. Whether you're blunt or direct, or kind of somewhat a bit harsh, hard around the edges, they go, but I fixed your problem, customer experience, I nailed it. It's like, dude, you're kind of rude, or you didn't really respond quickly. So understanding what I try and say to people — I know I said at the start, because you're looking for gold — the first thing is, it frustrates me to no end that most MSPs only think from themselves outward rather than customer backwards. Bradley and his co-founders would naturally be thinking customer backwards. I always did that because I was non-technical, and I am the proof that — someone just said that no update is an update. Absolutely. And I'm a non-technical MSP founder. When I first started it was me in a room with a bunch of ad hoc — in the very, like 2000, 2001 — ad hoc engineering stuff. I had no permanent staff, and I didn't know how to do anything, so I'd just be like, have you rebooted? Okay, no? Okay, well, yeah, we'll escalate that. But I was thinking of the customer. So I would challenge you firstly, from a mindset perspective, to just think from the customer backwards rather than you first.

And as it relates to sales, so that's the first. Building the second gold nugget around sales — because there's only two metrics in an MSP. Bradley touched on one, which is churn. The other is signing up deals. Dollar support deals — sign up more support deals dollar-wise than you lose every year, and lo and behold, you grow. But when you look at new business coming towards you, the other mistake that MSPs make is that they think they're looking for a technical solution when they're going to market. No, they're not. Because they don't give a toss about that. They don't understand any of that. What has happened — and I've got 22 years of on-the-ground qualitative research on this — it's the same every time, and nothing's ever changed. Although we're too small, too slow, weren't proactive — I feel like, God, I've grown — Bradley, do these ring a bell? It's the same thing in a sales meeting every time. So they're not looking for a technical solution, they're looking for a partnership and a relationship. So when it comes to customer experience, you need to be demonstrating the relationship stuff.

The other thing that boils my goat is that MSPs spend no time on their support proposal. This is a big gold nugget. The proposal — what do you say first? What is chapter one, like the first page, what is the second? We do the Simon Sinek sell the why, then the how, then the what, type, as an example. What most MSPs do is they barely have a proposal. There's nothing they can bind. I bet you Bradley, with his new branding, looks freaking amazing — he looks like a 200-person business. And then he'll be competing probably for the same deal with a smaller MSP that rocks up with some weird PowerPoint that's disconnected and doesn't seem to flow. Why is that? It's because most MSPs only focus on pricing and packaging. They forget that essentially in a sales situation you have to lead, as it relates to professional services, a customer along on the journey of, hey, this is why you're looking at outsourcing, this is why I should pick up — peace of mind, business continuity, cost containment, these types of things. So when you look at my proposal, I barely talk about technology, because they don't really care. I basically just say, yeah, we're a one-stop shop, that's about the extent of it, and then we show our solution builder approach as well.

So there's another gold nugget: think about your customer experience and the journey, and the argument. It's like a legal argument, sales. It's like, I'm going to guide these people through and ask them specific questions and build a case that by the end of my presentation there is no other choice than me. And 50% of the time, when you do a good job of that — I'd be interested in Bradley if you know these stats — 50% of the time it's a relief for the customer when they see someone present so well articulated and in a structured way and about relationship. They actually tell you, they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is what I was looking for. And you know why people do that? I think they do that — this is my assumption — is that it's painful looking at new providers. They don't actually want to have to go through — who wants to go through a tender process? It's a freaking nightmare. So when they actually get bamboozled by Bradley and they get to the end, they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm in, and they'll tell you 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time they won't. But then the other part — which is the Invarasoft part, and this is the last part that I'll mention, because there's a million things, I don't want to hold the time — the other thing that just grates me to no end, and James saw me present this the other day in person, is that to this day the customer digital experience I talked about before, of the service experience, is literally for most MSPs still mouse pads and stickers and squidgy balls with phone numbers and emails on them. That's the experience. So they come home, they get to work, and they're checking their apps for their weather and Spotify and all this stuff, and then they go to get IT support, they're like, how do I get — now you've got to find the sticker, it's on the monitor or something, I don't know. I mean, that's ridiculous.

So what you want to be thinking about is having a visual customer experience. You want to have branded, beautiful client portals, you want to have apps, all this sort of stuff, you want to have push notifications, all these sorts of things, because it's digital, and it's memorable, and it's noticeable. And when you've packaged all that up into your IT services proposal and you present how amazing that customer experience is going to be by showing them what they're going to get — because they don't give a toss about your RMM, your PSA, your backup tools and all that stuff, because they don't get anything from it. If all they're getting is a mouse pad and sticker, that's lackluster. So when you can say in a sales sense, look at this experience you're going to get, it's a gimme, it's memorable, it's a purple cow. So the digital, and taking away the darkness of IT support, is key, and it's why Bradley and my MSP will be focusing on all these points in sales situations, so that when they walk away they remember. They're like, wow, they have that video and they have these amazing tools that I'm going to get and I'm going to be able to use. They walk away and then they look at the other guy going, oh, I do Microsoft, I've got good stuff, I've got this or that — it's just not memorable. So there's a few tips, hopefully, that can help. Customers care about them, they don't care about you, right, at the end of the day.

Mistakes, Pitfalls and Managing to SLA

Yeah. All right. So Bradley, what are some of your mistakes, some of the pitfalls that you've made over the years that you think brought your customer experience down, that you went, oh, that wasn't a good move, if you wouldn't mind?

Of course, yeah. We all make mistakes. The biggest mistakes we've ever made — we've got lofty aspirations, we've grown quick, we've had times we've grown too much, and it's caused a lot of indigestion. You've got to be careful what you wish for sometimes. You go, hey, we want to grow fast, and if you turn the tap on and you take on too much, sometimes it's going to break your processes, break your people. So we've had a few instances of that. I think we've had probably three in the journey, in the 11 years we've been going, where we probably took a bit too much on and could have spread it out a little bit, or we waited a bit too long to hire those extra people, because you're always managing profitability and things.

But probably the biggest one we had, which is more recent, was — we hit COVID and it was busy, we had a lot of work to do with existing clients to get them working from home and all those sorts of things. It wasn't a mistake to put a survive and thrive program — we said to our team, we're not going to, we don't want you to worry about your jobs, we're just going to spend this time to really work on the business, and we did. We did a lot of work around maturing IT, process, those sorts of things. I'm always accountable for everything that happens, and we decided to take the service desk, which is the most important part of the business, through a bit of a change. Let's look at the way we do things, let's make sure it's set up to scale. And we did a lot of work with our team and with external consultants to mature it. I stayed out of the process because I was just sitting at home drinking during those two years, that's where you know, hanging out. But no, I kind of let the team run with it, and it all came to a head in about October last year.

When you get a complaint from a client direct, you take it seriously. I had three or four clients ring me in the course of a couple of days, and I'm like, what's going on here? So what had happened was, we changed the process. We've always been really high touch, all about response time — we find response times one of the biggest catalysts for us to get good results from clients. We did a lot of good things to mature the way we allocate tickets and triage those tickets and set them up for success. But because I wasn't involved in the process, I would have changed the decisions that were being made. And you've got to give your team and your leaders the right to make decisions. But yeah, we went away from that real high touch piece, which is what we were calling service desk 1.0, and we went to 2.0 in July last year. It took about a quarter for it to really come to the surface. For some reason the team had shifted to managing to SLA. So someone puts a request in for something small — that's the stuff that gets counted — a big incident, everyone just gets on them and works on them anyway, naturally. And the small things, all the day-to-day stuff, was just getting managed to SLAs, like sometimes the next day. And so we went from being really high touch, less than an hour for all requests, to all of a sudden it was over a day.

So I just sort of got in and understood what was going on, and the changes in the process, and we had to basically launch service desk 2.1, we called it, and we turned the ship over that quarter. I suppose the one thing is, understand what's unique about you and your team. For us it was always about that response time and that agility of being — even though we're bigger, making sure you keep that. Why? Because client — if you change that, which we did, we changed it overnight, and it was good to start with, and it took a bit of time for it to come to a head. That was a big mistake, because it nearly cost us a couple of clients, but we were able to turn things around. I was on the front foot. I did videos, because I couldn't talk to every client, we did videos straight away saying, hey, we're not where we wanted to be — so communication's key — we're looking at it. And then every week an update: hey, we've worked these things out. We got on the front foot with communicating, especially some of the bigger clients. And what I found was all the teams started having that same conversation with all clients, because I was doing it, and then within a quarter we sort of turned it around. So we took all the maturity that we learned through that consulting phase — all the data and the analytics and the triage and all those things that we had to get right, so we had better data — and then we brought our agility back in. So that's, I know that's a bit of a loose way of explaining it, but that was one, if I was to give it to you.

On that note, quick question, because we all know the Fujitsus of the world where it is just SLAs — that's the only way you can survive at that kind of scale. So what are your thoughts, because you've mentioned earlier you want to scale and go and build a big business, which is awesome — so how do you see delivering that hybrid between personal touch and just a little bit more observational skills? So what I mean is, a level one person going, hmm, I probably should escalate this straight away, well maybe I need to tell Bradley about this, as opposed to literally living in their own bubble and maybe just escalating it. How do you see that fine balance, what have you learned through that?

There's obviously, you hire people that are better than you. So we've got people that run the service desk, like a service manager and team leaders. We've got separate pods — we've got three teams now and we'll have a fourth team soon. So we've worked out that there's only so many direct reports a team leader can have, and so many clients and so much revenue. So having your team, you'll have to eventually split into teams, I think, any way you can scale out and have that intimacy there. But yeah, I think we're getting better at identifying problems, like problem management, and going, okay, this is not just an isolated issue. So we're getting better at analyzing the data and understanding where there's problems. Do I have the answers to answer your question? Not really. I mean, I'm not as nitty-gritty into the day-to-day, I've got so much other stuff that I'm working on. But certainly the team have gotten better at saying, hey, I think this is going to become a problem, and identifying it to a senior leadership team, so that we can actually analyze it and work it out. Because unfortunately, in the past, sometimes the problem management piece didn't get looked after the way it should have, and those things start to — you suddenly get a client going, hey, are you really looking across all the tickets and actually looking for things that are more problem based, not just incident based? So I don't know if I answered your question, Jamie.

Scaling With Pods, Account Management and Automation

No, the pods — absolutely, you always nail it. But the pods, that's an interesting thing, because that is what scale is. You've got to think about, when you're a small MSP you're essentially out of the pod, and then as you scale you've got to break it out into teams. We've done a lot of work around account management. I was saying in that talk that I gave, where James attended, we see the value of account management as not being a sales role. In any other industry, account management is essentially sales. You could call it customer success — we went away from that term because I think in Australia people just don't get what that means, we went back to the term account manager, but they're essentially responsible for churn. And what we describe the role as being is the glue that holds the MSP accountable and advocates for the client, and the business in that sense. There's so many moving parts between all the different teams — service desk and projects and onboarding and procurement and everything — that we've found from experience that if you don't have someone that is in more of an administrative operational kind of role like that to kind of be the glue together, it does fall apart, because people miss. You'll lose a client because you'll say to a client, sure, I'll come back to you with your recommendations, a month goes by and you don't. Who is responsible for that? Oh, sales. I forgot, oh, I'm so busy over here. That's for account management. I'll escalate, I'll get that stuff done. So we've started to grow quite large account management teams, with supporting account coordinators in that sense, to deliver the personal SMB experience at scale, because it gets compartmentalized, and they're all responsible for doing what we all did when we were smaller.

It's interesting, and we're similar. We have, in each of the three teams, a team leader, and there's an account manager assigned to that team. And 100% right — they see things between projects and the service desk, and they're the ones that help coordinate the strategic business reviews, and they drag the right pre-sales solution architect person in when they need to. So that's all part of it when you get a bit bigger. Unfortunately, when you're smaller, you do it all. I used to do all the architecture and all the account management, and I got less and less hands-on, doing the sales and the technical sales. But eventually you've got to think about those things, because as you scale you can't do all that. So they're all important elements over the journey, but you'll end up having to — you've got to find enough revenue to put those roles in place. That's a bit of a game of chess, which I've been playing for 11 years and continue to play. We've got to put a CFO in soon, and probably an HR manager, and again I'm trying to find the revenue to be able to facilitate those. So it is a big game of chess over time.

Bradley, just quickly, you touched on something that you mentioned a second ago, and then I want to jump to James. You mentioned high touch. Now that was one of the things that you stopped doing — was that just basic communication, or was that resolution of those tickets that were coming through?

That was response. It was response time and resolution, because the team got to a point where they were just scheduling. A request would come in, and what used to happen, in its more immature phase, was that we found 40% of our tickets weren't even — there wasn't even sometimes a subject assigned to it, or a category, it wasn't categorized. And we're like, how — we were starting to do some work around DevOps and analytics, saying, how do we, where are all our tickets, what are they? And I realized that 40% of categories are like, hang on, why aren't they categorizing? We're not setting our tickets up for success, we're not triaging them properly. So we put that process in place. They started scheduling engineers rather than giving them a list. Because what used to happen was, you get your tickets, you might have 10 or 15 at a time, and each engineer, we used to train them to sort of prioritize them, but we've got to be a bit smarter with that now. So the high touch bit — there's a list of tickets that they've got to get to in a timely manner, but there's also some other tools we've brought in, like TimeZest. So rather than chasing a client three or four times that's busy, chase them once, give them — we explain to them, hey, we know you're busy, so use TimeZest and book it in with us, and we find that they do. We find things like new client onboards — if you can't get to all the end users, we let them just come to us and book TimeZest times in for the team to get on and explain to them how to log a ticket and put the agent on their devices.

So when I say we lost that high touch, we lost the response time. The techs were just working on a schedule, and then we would look at a utilization piece and go, they had this 15-minute block schedule, and we realized that they called that client, didn't get onto them, so they waited for the next ticket. It was like we lost all of our efficiency and all that utilization. So we had to bring back some of that old-school way of doing things, which was what made us unique and why clients liked us. We've taken on clients before, and they're going, the service was really bad, and then we said, well, can you explain what it was like? And when we got to the bottom of it with the current MSP, they just said, every time a ticket comes in, it goes into a stack, and we just deal with the one at the bottom. And I'm like, well, that doesn't make sense, you're not prioritizing anything. You're not getting a ticket and going, hey, that should just go to old mate because he's going to fix that in two seconds, and that one should go to that person. So yeah, I agree with that.

I'll just jump in and say that this is what happened — it's interesting to hear both of us talk about it, because it is the other end, you don't hear a lot of this in the SMB space, that when you get a bit bigger. We break up our teams: level one, level two, level three, and everybody's levels are different, but our level one is essentially just change requests. So what will happen sometimes is people will just go, oh, that's a change request, I'll leave it later, but that could actually be urgent, and these are the things that annoy clients. So we realized we've got to nail change requests, so that's the level one team. Level two is when it starts to become technical faults. Level three, it's just more advanced, and so on and so forth. But what we also did many years ago — it was a $400 off-the-shelf ticketing product that did auto allocation and load balancing of tickets, would you believe. And when we finally outgrew that, we went to look at Autotask, ConnectWise, and we asked them, oh, where's your auto allocation and load balancing? They were like, that's the triage, or the dispatcher. And I was like, where's that in the software, where's this dispatcher you're talking about? They're like, no, that's a human. I'm like, hang on, what are you talking about? Like, so a human has to keep — we never have been doing that, what we've been doing. So we ended up building our own PSA, crazily, but it's because we are enabling this to happen, which is, we categorize all our tickets level one, two, three. When using our apps, the user is filling it in, giving you the correct ticket types — well, it's 90% correct — and then what we do is we auto allocate the ticket, because we've labeled a level one, two, three, to the level one team or level two team, and then it gets load balanced across. We always thought that the technology should drive the engineer's behavior, not let the engineer have to cherry-pick and make those decisions. And these are examples where it worked wonders. It always has. So it gets things to the right areas where it needs to be, and you no longer have to rely on humans to be making decisions around that, which is what Bradley was just describing — the scenario where humans were left to make a decision, and then it started to kind of go a bit haywire. So you can use efficiency there.

And I'll just say, this is a gold nugget, and it also annoys me, because I hear it all the time from MSPs. They're like, I'm white glove. Dude, we're all white glove, what the heck are you talking about? We just talked about it. We're customer service. So what are you talking about? We're all white glove. What the customer actually wants, just so you know, is a fast and accurate resolution to their problem. That is it. They don't care how they get that, just give me that result. They want a result. So a lot of MSPs will be thinking, no, I need to do it this old-fashioned way, or different way. You've got to look at more modern ways of doing things, and combining it with traditional — that's the sweet spot.

Takeaways: Ask Your Clients and Map the Journey

All right, and we've got about nine minutes before time. So James, from an operational point of view, you spent a lot of time coaching MSPs on actually improving their business in terms of customer experience. What are some of the takeaways that you think an MSP can implement today, ideally — Jamie's using the term gold nuggets — that you find actually delivers results from what your program recommends?

If I could say anything — and Jamie and Brad have mentioned this before — actually go and ask the clients what they want and what they need. The amount of MSP owners I talk to about these sorts of challenges and changes in the business, and I ask the question, when was the last time you asked your clients why are they with you and what do they value you for? And the blank looks that I get, of like, I've never asked that question. Don't make assumptions. Actually go and ask your clients. That's going to be your success point from the start. And I've heard that so many times, it's obvious, right, when I say it like that. But when you get so busy — yeah, we've spoken a lot about the initial sales process and account management, and then the service delivery point.

I think there's a point in what Jamie was just saying around leveraging some technology. We're still very much driven by email, and we're not taking into account client changes and demographics. I haven't come across many MSPs that are really doing any sort of self-service type arrangements where people can manage some of these technology components themselves, or even providing chat functions. We're not understanding the demographics that we're providing to. We're still doing very old-school stuff in a very inefficient way.

But especially for smaller MSPs — what Brad and Jamie were talking about with the scale — the challenges of the touch points become different, because it's always the cross-departmental functionality and the handoffs. It's the handoffs that are risky. If we're going from sales to service, or sales to projects, that handoff is where the communication drops off, and that's where it's super important. When you're small, like what Brad was talking about, you're often the one person that sees it through the whole way. So that's not your challenge. Your challenge is clearly defining the functionality that you're providing. Because what happens when you don't have that defined, it all mashes up into one, and it becomes difficult to delegate and get other people to do it, and normal leadership challenges. But you're not really thinking about the flow for the client, because you don't have it mapped out. You don't know that, well, I meet someone, and we do the lead generation, then we've got a prospect, then we've got the close, then we've got the onboarding, and we've got XYZ. We see it all as one, and we don't know where we need to improve and what's breaking, because we've mashed it up. So the smaller ones need to take that step back, talk to the clients, map out the client interactions, then you can map out where the improvements need to come. You've got an action plan straight away, very simply, from there.

I like it. I like it. All right, if anyone has any questions, feel free to drop in the chat. We do have some other bits and pieces that I wanted to cover, but with the timing we've only got five more minutes, so I'm hesitant to open a can of worms in five minutes, so to speak.

Giving Clients Access, Transparency and Leading on CX

So if I could comment on what James just said — yeah, please, please — you'd absolutely need to ask the customer, and or at least speak to them about it. And to be fair, if Invarasoft was selling to customers and kind of cut the MSP out of it, it would be a billion-dollar company right now, because as if the customer doesn't want to have modern apps and a lot of stuff. But that's the funny thing, is that MSPs, for whatever reason, this industry — think about even accountants have embraced Xero and all the new technology in cloud, and giving clients links to access their data. Have you not had your accountant say, oh, here's the link to your profile and you can get all that stuff? MSPs don't do that. Why? I don't get it. I sort of get it — it's because of that technical mindset, thinking that because they think from their perspective, they probably don't like live chat and apps and all these different things, maybe that's it, and then they predispose their thoughts onto the situation. So in our world of providing that customer experience platform, a lot of MSPs that are still kind of a bit wary of it will be like, I don't know if my customer will like it. It's like, dude, just give it to them. And then lo and behold, they show it, and they go, well, the client loved it. And it's like this revelation — they were shocked that the client loved it. And it's like, wow, okay.

But I'll give you an example where you don't want to let a client — which, when I was young, because I started very young, and you're dealing with people like I am now, comparably, someone 20, 30, 40 years older, that'd tell you something, and go, oh, I'd better do that in my MSP. Wrong. You don't want them — you have to listen, but you don't want to structure your service methodology around what the customer wants, because if that's the case, they'll just be SMSing you and calling you all the time. Who wants that? So for example, we have, for a long time — we just do, if it's urgent, call, if it's not urgent, use the app. Why is that effective? Because it's easy to remember for the customer, and they go, if it's urgent I'll call, if it's not I'll just log it through that methodology. What a lot of people will do is they'll see for example a software like us, and then they'll go, well, I'll keep email and I'll keep this and that, and just ruins the technology like us, because then you're just distributing it over more effort. So you still get the email ticket — sorry for swearing, nobody heard that — fully structured, emailed to you with no information, and then some of it's great. Why would you mix and match like that? It makes no sense. People are scared to take away old-fashioned things. It's like we're just addicted to the fax, like a fax machine. So you've got to look at what is best for you and how you can be the most efficient to deliver what it is. So don't let a customer just determine your service methodology, but listen to them. Next time you speak to them, say, hey, would you like to see your tickets in a ticket portal? Would you like to see your Office 365 licensing? How about we made it more clear about your roadmaps and vCIO process? Yeah, that would be great, I guarantee they'd say. So that's the sort of stuff James is talking about — what do you want from onboarding, all these sorts of things. So anyway, food for thought.

And we just lost James. We've just had a comment from David that kind of wraps that up nicely as well. What you just saw James and Jamie talking about — most techs are often too scared to give clients access to your tools, because they're worried that their job's going to become irrelevant, or your MSP is going to become irrelevant. And I think ultimately the repeating topic of today has been that that's not the case. The customers care about an outcome. They don't care about the technical nuances of what you're doing to solve it, they care about an outcome.

It's not the decision of the tech on whether the clients get access. One of our biggest selling points — and I'll give away a bit of our secrets — is transparency. It's been there since day one. We give them access to view our RMM tools, we give them access to all the ticketing portals. We use BrightGauge and give them dashboards that show exactly the response time and the resolution times, because we don't want anywhere to hide. And that's how we sell — one of the differentiators we have when we sell well. And we live it. It's true. We don't want anywhere to hide, we want them to see the good and the bad. You know, things aren't being patched or whatever — well, that's that accountability. Accountability is one of our core values, it's accountable. So yep, transparency is big, and clients want it. So it's not your start and not the tech's decision, it's business you make as a leader, and let them die by the sword with it. Clients appreciate that mindset. It changes the customer experience.

I do want to just jump on that point, that is an awesome point. It's another thing that I've noticed as well. If you're a CEO and you think I should improve my customer experience, then you go and chat to your senior engineer and say, we should do this — they don't care about the customer that much, that's not how their brain works. So you're never going to get this roses and flowers response from them vindicating your decision as the business owner to improve customer experience, because they're like, we're doing a job, why do I need to do that? And the other thing, if it means they have to go and put something in, like a tool or a process, now you've just given them a job, so they're reacting based on things that are not going to help you improve customer experience. I do see this all the time, where a business owner, like Bradley, goes, yeah, we need to nail customer experience, it goes to a service desk team leader who's the one responsible for that type of thing, and they go, I don't get it, like, why do I care about this stuff, now I've got to actually implement it. So on the flip side, don't let your technical, non-customer-experience-focus — they're customer focused, they always are, I don't want to say they're not, of course they are, but not customer experience, they don't really care about that stuff. So you're the one running the business. If you believe what we've been talking about, then execute it, and just sell it. That's how it's going to be.

I like it. I like it. Well, guys, thank you so much for attending and being today's panelists, and everyone on the call. Hopefully you took some tidbits away today — as Jamie's termed them, gold nuggets, I like that, I'm going to use it myself. Like I said, this session is recorded, so if you want to jump back to it and re-listen, it will be on our Vimeo and our YouTube channels.

Very quickly, we do have some upcoming — our next topic on MSPs in Conversation, which is yet to be scheduled because we have a few conferences coming up, is how MSPs can suck at marketing less. So always a very popular topic, excited for that one. We have, in person, speaking of marketing, a marketing workshop coming up as well on the 12th of July. And if you're in Sydney for the ConnectIT conference, the Kaseya and now Datto conference, make sure you stop by and say hello. We'll be sponsoring, so looking forward to seeing a bunch of you in person. Again, thank you panelists for joining today, and viewers, I hope that you all enjoyed your lunch, and until next time, thanks.

Okay guys, thank you, thank you, thank you.