One of the questions that invariably pops up when any group of MSP owners are talking is price:
"What do you charge? How do you charge? What’s your best margin solution?"
Our answer to that question is fairly simple: Your services automation tool should answer those questions for you, not other MSP owners. You should be able to see the uptime (or downtime) of any solution you deploy with your customers. You should be able to easily see what products are consistently triggering support tickets, and which solutions are sailing along smoothly.
The cost of a solution isn’t its price tag, it’s the cost to your business to keep that solution delivering in your customer’s environment.
Many MSPs struggle with pricing because they don’t have or don’t know how to use the data from their own business. How do I know that? Because, in the early days of our own MSP business, This Solution, we were running blind. We were constantly trying to understand and, in some cases, micromanage our costs. The issue? We weren’t looking at our staff as a cost we could effectively manage. Instead, we were completely focused on what products we could squeeze more money out of. We also weren’t delving into where our products were adding to our costs by routinely demanding technician attention. It’s at the intersection of labor and product where many bad things happen for MPS businesses.
Tried and Tested in a Real MSP Environment
When we invested in the technology that became ServiceTree Connect™, we knew that having accurate, real-time data about each solution we deploy, in each customer’s site, was elemental to not only delivering a good customer experience but also pricing our services and offerings correctly to maintain margin.
That’s why our tool’s UI clearly shows data on each solution, its ticketing history and more. With our real-time data, MSPs can see what costs money—wasted tech time, troublesome products, needy customers (come on, we’ve all been there …). After you act to right the ship, you can then easily track the impact of whatever change you make—the data will tell the tale.
Sometimes a troubled business can make one simple change to staffing, to a product line or support level in a contract, and see a tremendous impact on their margins and, ultimately, the bottom line. Learn how our intuitive UI helps you see real-time data from your business and make seeing trends and hiccups easy.
Guest blog courtesy of ServiceTree. Read more ServiceTree guest blogs here.
