Elevate Your MSP Services: 4 Strategies to Drive Customer Satisfaction

The managed services market is projected to grow from $280.96 billion in 2024 to around $410.92 billion by 2029, according to Mordor, citing an expected increased need for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to outsource various business needs.

This signifies that managed service providers (MSPs) have a huge opportunity for growth, but satisfying clients is vital to achieving this. However, 64% of MSPs find that increasing customer satisfaction remains a primary challenge for boosting growth and profitability.

Having top-tier software solutions for clients is essential for exceptional customer service, but it’s not everything. In this blog, we'll talk about four ways MSPs can enhance customer satisfaction:

1. Ensure Seamless Onboarding

When a new client signs up for your services, the onboarding process is their first real experience with you as their MSP; it sets the tone for your entire relationship with the client.

A positive onboarding experience makes them more likely to have a favorable view of your service. In fact, 63% of customers consider onboarding when choosing a service or product and making a great first impression is crucial.

Similarly, Gitnux found that effective onboarding processes can provide 50% higher chances that customers will retain your services. However, 85% of customers saw a drop in satisfaction with their providers’ service during the onboarding process.

This must encourage MSPs to actively implement a smooth onboarding process. This is the best time to understand the challenges of clients, as well as their operational landscape and infrastructure — what software they use for daily operations and how they manage their data.

Based on this information, MSPs must create a service-level agreement that helps provide transparency to the client.

AvePoint Elements, a multi-tenant management platform dedicated to MSPs, can help ease the burden of onboarding through built-in monitoring, provisioning, and templatizing capabilities. It also comes with delegated administration to grant MSPs more granular and time-sensitive access to customers' workloads. This also allows onboarding new customers and assigning onboarding responsibilities to people within the team.

The benefits of delegated admin for MSPs include:

• Improved efficiency - The division of labor paves way for efficient management, allowing tasks to be handled by specialized personnel.

• Enhanced security - Appropriately delegating administrative privileges ensures that the right people only have access, reducing the risk of security breaches and unauthorized access.

• Scalability - As organizations expand, the ability to delegate administrative tasks becomes crucial for scalable management.

• Better compliance - Enables detailed activity tracking to help with compliance and simplify the audit process while providing a clear record of who did what and when.
  

2. Provide Proactive Support and Monitoring

An MSP that can anticipate and resolve issues before they become problems is appreciated by businesses. However, 52% of companoes are concerned that an MSP would be more reactive than proactive.

Businesses that highly rely on their digital tools for daily operations need an MSP that can immediately respond to critical concerns, or better yet, anticipate them before digital workspace risks become problems.

Picture this: if your client has been a victim of a cybersecurity attack and was unable to access their digital workspaces in the middle of a busy workday, it disrupts communication and stalls productivity. If this issue takes several hours to fix, it will also cause significant downtime.

MSPs can provide proactive support to their clients by regularly monitoring their infrastructure and workspaces. This is an opportunity to identify risks and potential gaps, and offer remediation processes immediately, which could prevent critical concerns for the company.

These regular updates and check-ins foster a strong relationship between MSPs and clients, allowing for seamless communication. These frequent engagements regarding service status, upcoming maintenance, and any changes or potential interruptions in service delivery is highly appreciated by clients, leading to better satisfaction and loyalty.

AvePoint Elements helps you proactively monitor your clients' environments to identify and address any issues that may arise quickly. It provides a centralized dashboard across multiple tenants and different clients as well as risk notifications, enabling you, as an MSP, to monitor clients’ workspaces in a single pane, easily identifying potential problems before they come.

3. Understand Business Demands

As technologies evolve and demand increases, MSPs are presented with opportunities to leverage new technologies and expanded demand for services as they come.

For example, according to Canalys, the need for compliance consulting services from MSPs will increase by 60% in 2024. If an existing client needs such service, and you can provide this expertise to them, it will help you retain this customer, signifying their satisfaction with the scope of offerings you can provide.

Moreover, understanding your clients' needs presents an opportunity to drive the adoption of the latest technologies. To give an instance, 80% of organizations are planning to increase AI spending in 2024 — a golden opportunity for MSPs to help clients implement AI. Case in point: the AI and Information Management Report found that while 88% of organizations feel prepared for AI adoption, 95% face challenges during implementation.

As you adapt to new technologies, Elements can help with adding new solutions into your offering portfolio easily and bringing together your migration, backup, security, and management products in a single, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. This quick and easy integration allows you to continue assisting customers without interruption as you scale.

Meanwhile, for clients looking to have AI tools, such as Copilot for Microsoft 365, MSPs can offer services that can help address AI implementation challenges.

AvePoint’s Copilot for Microsoft 365 Campaign in a Box Kit provides MSPs with tools and resources to help businesses prepare, secure, and optimize Copilot.

4. Obtain Training Resources and Certifications

About 52% of MSPs lack skilled employees, according to the IT Industry Outlook 2024 from the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).

The deficiency of skilled IT professionals in the workforce challenges the MSP space significantly. For example, MSPs are struggling to find candidates with cybersecurity skills, which is impacting their initiatives in this area. In fact, 58% of MSPs are trying to grow their cybersecurity initiatives, CompTIA further found, but this has been impeded by the skills gap.

As an MSP, your clients expect quality service, expert advice, and solutions tailored to their needs across various industries — the combination of all these will bring about customer satisfaction.

In response to this need, the CompTIA report indicates that 43% are pursuing training for existing employees to upskill them. Meanwhile, others are turning to the pool of resources by partnering with independent software providers (ISVs).

According to our Global MSP Survey, 42% of MSPs work directly with ISVs and the majority (31%) are enticed by the advanced training they receive from ISVs.

AvePoint’s Partner Program is one of such that offers a breadth of resources for MSPs, such as technical, marketing, and sales resources to help you achieve your goal — ensure customer satisfaction and boost revenues.

These resources are housed in an assets library on our Partner Portal that contains go-to-market guides, brochures, pitch decks, and access to a variety of training and certifications that can assist with sales motions and deal closures.

Unlock Your MSP Growth Potential with AvePoint

Like in any business, it is vital for MSPs to maintain client satisfaction to achieve a successful relationship.

A positive partnership with your clients will be an avenue to keep your existing clients as recurring customers and build your reputation. However, it is equally important to be equipped with the necessary resources to respond to clients’ growing needs and effectively provide the services expected from MSPs, such as seamless onboarding, immediately responding to risks, understanding gaps in clients’ workspaces, and responding to changing business demands.

Learn more about how to further scale your MSP operations and achieve business success. Read our eBook on the six business concerns that MSPs must address.