The Pain of Acquiring Customer Feedback for MSPs

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The Pain of Acquiring Customer Feedback for MSPs image

This is a guest post by my friend Derek Brown of Pronto Marketing. Pronto Marketing provides website and digital marketing services for MSPs.

Derek featured on episode 8 of TubbTalk and gave some valuable advice on How to Build a Great MSP Website. I invited him back and this time he explains how MSPs can get ahead of their competitors with an effective process for measuring customer satisfaction.

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With the standardisation of technology and an increase in the number of established competitors, it’s getting more difficult for Managed Service Providers (MSPs to stand out from the competition. Improving customer satisfaction is one of the best ways to jump ahead in such a crowded field and stand out to prospective clients as well as retain existing clients.

Most MSPs have tried to collect customer feedback in some form in the past, but the process didn’t work. Maybe you’ve used native ConnectWise or Autotask surveys and found they aren’t that intuitive and don’t get good response rates. Maybe you’ve tried third-party solutions that aren’t designed for MSPs and are therefore either too generic or too expensive for what you need.

Over the past 10 years at Pronto Marketing we’ve heard first-hand these challenges and understand why MSPs have fallen behind in collecting customer feedback, it’s just too difficult, for too little. We just felt there had to be a better way – one designed with the specific needs of the industry in mind.

The Feedback Solution MSPs Need

There are two core components of good feedback for MSPs – specific ticket feedback on a request by request basis, and general sentiment about your company at a higher level. By using Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, you can capture both the micro and macro impressions of your clients and better understand how your team is performing.

Collect CSAT Feedback from Your Helpdesk

CSAT ratings are designed to capture the mood of your client for a specific ticket. These short and easy to execute surveys go out immediately after a ticket is closed in your helpdesk (e.g. Autotask, ConnectWise, Kasaya BMS, Zendesk), as a follow up from an account manager or during the middle of a long deployment with multiple milestones.

CSAT surveys are the most effective way to quickly spot acute problems related to the execution of specific tasks.

Your CSAT score is determined by the overall percentage of positive ratings. So, if you receive 100 ratings and 98 of them are positive, your CSAT score is 98%. These surveys are great because they’re quick to set up, easy to benchmark, and trackable over time.

CSAT surveys provide the instant insights MSP owners and operations directors need to identify critical issues. If techs need training or there is a gap in the process, they’ll know quickly because of the immediate, concise feedback these surveys provide.

Capture General Sentiment Quarterly with NPS

Developed as a measure of customer loyalty, NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys consist of a single question:

“How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”

That single question can provide a wealth of information when used to measure performance over time across all of your accounts. Each client that completes the survey will choose a number between 0 and 10, with zero being the worst score and 10 the best. They are then categorized as either detractors, passives, or promoters.

One single question can provide a wealth of information when used to measure performance over time across all of your accounts says Derek Brown of @Prontomarketing Click to Tweet

Promoters – Your promoters are clients who rate your company as either a 9 or a 10.
Passives – Your passives are clients who rate your company as either 7 or 8 – often small efforts and engagement can make them promoters.
Detractors – Detractors rate your company 6 or below and are the ones you have to worry about.

Your NPS score is an aggregate of all NPS survey results. In it, you subtract the % of detractors from the % of promoters to get a score between 100% and -100%.

There are numerous benchmarks for NPS available, with the NPS range of -100 to +100, a “positive” score of NPS above 0 is considered “good”, +50 is “Excellent,” and above 70 is considered “world class”.

No MSP wants to lose a client. The long-term value is simply too high. With NPS feedback, you can spot detractors who might be on the verge of cancelling before they reach the point of no return. It’s a good starting point to understand who is engaged, who isn’t, and who could potentially leave.

Introducing SimpleSat

A few years back we decided to build an end-to-end customer satisfaction solution – one that we’d use and love at Pronto, and one that was a perfect fit for our MSP clients.

Simplesat is a complete customer satisfaction tool for MSPs, providing easy-to-use tools to measure customer feedback in both the short and long term. We take care of the necessary metrics and channels through which to ask for feedback, provide all of the dashboards needed to analyze it, and give you tools to publish positive comments as real-time testimonials on your website.

Simplesat is designed for the MSP industry by a team that’s been working closely with MSPs for a decade, meaning we understand your business process and integrate with ConnectWise, Autotask, Kasaya BMS, Zapier, BrightGauge and a growing number of services. Connecting your ticketing system with your customer feedback survey tools and automating the process ensures you get as much feedback as possible.

If you’re tired of the headache of trying to gather feedback from your clients, signup for a free 30-day trial of Simplesat today and learn how we can help.

What do you use to measure customer satisfaction in your MSP business? Does it work for you? Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear thoughts.

This is a guest post by Derek Brown, Managing Director of Pronto Marketing. Check out Pronto’s services for MSPs. Pronto is the leading all-in-one website service for growing businesses around the world and provides a host of related services including copywriting, design, development, hosting, SEO, email newsletters, 24/hour updates.