Differentiate your Managed IT services by empowering customers with self-service capabilities
Let me show you how Managed IT Providers can win more business by offering self-service capabilities. Imagine being able to get customers to pay you more while relieving you of work and being happier with your service.
Nearly every organization outsources a portion of IT services. In smaller businesses – say with less than 50 staff, the responsibility will often come down to the finance owner. If there is no finance owner, then it’s probably down to the owner of the business. In most cases, they will want to outsource as much as possible, while still maintaining control and visibility over costs.
For companies with 100-500 staff, there is likely to be an internal owner of IT, however they will likely still look to outsource a lot of the work rather than maintain an internal team.
In both of these cases, offering a level of self-service delivers benefit and gives you real differentiation. If you can move a significant portion of your standard changes to self-service will exponentially increase customer satisfaction and propel your profitability.
The benefits to the customer of having self-service capabilities:
1. Empowerment
Empowerment is a powerful motivator, particularly for more technical customers who are used to being able to make their own changes. This could swing business over competitors that cannot offer self-service.
2. Make changes at their convenience
Most small business owners work beyond normal business hours, as such the ability to add, remove, change or view access, and to reset passwords is something they will love.
3. Reduce helpdesk load
With self-service, it is possible to clear a large amount of requests from the service desk – this makes your service desk more responsive to customers’ needs and increase your ability to focus on real problems. Make this a reality.
4. One place to go
Being able to go to 1 place for IT service is much better than the usual experience of navigating 27 different services or needing to call/email for assistance.
5. Authenticated Requests
Self-service requires the requestor to be authenticated in order to make a change. Often changes that come through the helpdesk are not properly authenticated.
6. Audited Changes
When changes are made by self-service, the user and time of the change is recorded, this gives you traceability for billing.
7. Less mistakes
An automated self-service system removes the inevitability of human error, this means processes are consistently followed, any typo’s can be corrected.
Using a solution like Atria allows businesses to self-manage their IT services without needing technical expertise. This means that trusted administrative or HR staff can safely take on responsibility for managing IT in a small business without needing any advanced skills. Atria manages Identity, Office 365 licenses, Exchange and Exchange Online, Password resets and capability to productise and automate virtually anything you need to deliver to your customers.
