The Essentials For Becoming Your Customer's Trusted IT Advisor

By Mathieu Pipe-Rondeau, SherWeb

The most important part of any business relationship is trust. For many of your customers, their size often means they lack substantial internal resources, requiring them to trust key advisors to help them run their business. This includes lawyers, accountants, or an IT team. For Managed Service Providers (MSP), the ability to build trust is critical to keeping current customers and attracting new ones. Their business is practically in your hands; whether you’re helping with their productivity, transforming their business processes, keeping them compliant, or getting them back online after a security breach. If you can’t build trust, you can’t build a business.

How Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can Build Trust

As IT undergoes transformations, you need to add new skill sets, expertise, certifications, and other capabilities to tangibly show your customers why they can trust you. This starts by always keeping your customers’ needs front and center, treating each of them individually and constantly delivering value. For example, is your customer still on-premises? Explain to them how, with the Office 2010 End of Service right around the corner, there will be no more updates and no more support, which means customers will be exposed to cyber attacks and compliance issues. This is time sensitive and invaluable business advice that showcases your focus and knowledge. When they have other questions, they’ll come back to you for advice.