Not to state the obvious, but one of the most important care-abouts for customer satisfaction is responsiveness. Although it may seem obvious, in 17 years of managed services, this continued to be a point of contention for many prospective customers that I spoke with and often top of the list of reasons why they were looking to make a change in MSP’s. I earned many new customers by demonstrating how passionate my team and I were about responsiveness and how we made it part of our DNA.
Responsiveness builds trust! In my experience, when a client knows they can count on hearing back from someone quickly, the trust between the parties increases dramatically which in turn increases customer retention. As a leader and a manager, I tried to always practice what I preached which was the art of the quick response. Even if I didn’t have the answer to the question or couldn’t act on next steps right away, responding to acknowledge receipt of the request, and explaining what I was doing with the info, always went a long way in building a trusted relationship.
One of the biggest hinderances of responsiveness is often fear of not being able to answer the question or request. This is often most difficult for your most valued engineers because their analytical personality often inhibits them from putting themselves out there without having a clear-cut solution to the problem. It’s a great characteristic really but for the leaders, managers, coaches, and mentors, providing easy tools of the trade for meaningful responses may help put them at ease while fostering that sought after trusted relationship.