Growing the MSP Revenue Stream
by Gary Audin
Published in Telecom Reseller April 2020
MSPs configure and manage their customers’ IT and network resources. Once an MSP has all the customer resources to manage, revenue growth can occur by acquiring new customers (not easy) or adding new services to the existing customer base. Adding service management to the existing customer base delivers improved performance and the user satisfaction experiences. Adding service management to the MSP portfolio expands the revenue stream while increasing the customers’ loyalty to the MSP.
Enterprise service management for the SMB
Smaller and medium sized organizations have to compete with larger organizations that have greater financial and IT staff resources. The SMBs need to compete effectively, offering the same level of products and services in order to survive. The SMBs can be supported by MSPs on a subscription basis. The SMBs can operate as well as the enterprises by gaining access through the MSP to sophisticated tools and expert staff without the huge investment made by enterprises.
Elements of service management
Your customer wants to handle and resolve IT issues daily to sustain its business. The MSP needs to apply IT Service Management (ITSM) and devise a strategic approach including monitoring and managing the way IT is used within a customer’s organization. The ITSM goal operates by aligning the customer’s IT/network with their business objectives. ITSM practices have evolved from traditional IT to focus on problem prevention rather than putting out fires after an issue escalates.
Adding service performance management to your portfolio
When a MSP wants to add to its portfolio, it wants to increase revenue with the least cost and smallest staff additions. This can be accomplished through automation and artificial intelligence (AI) as delivered by Virsae Service Management (VSM) www.virsae.com.
AI is about data rather than intelligence. The more data collected, the better the results. AI can troubleshoot issues by drawing on past experiences to solve new and emerging problems. AI can compare attributes to detect common patterns and draw conclusions about the nature of problems which leads to how they should be resolved. By performing AI automatically in a powerful cloud, an AI-enabled management platform can draw on incident data from thousands of global customer deployments with advanced learning and analysis.
Benefits of offering service management
With Virsae Service Management (VSM) www.virsae.com based on ITSM, MSPs can be proactive, rather than reactive. MSPs can flag issues before a customer realizes the issue exists. This functionality allows the MSP to automatically issue the trouble ticket in advance of the customer’s complaint which is critical for the efficiency of the MSP. Through service management automation, MSPs can spend less time managing their business and more time doing their business.
New insights for your customers
A MSP can add service management by implementing their own internal platform. This can deliver the insights about an individual customer’s service performance. By using a cloud based platform that supports multiple SMBs, the MSP can gain global insights that can pinpoint problems across many IT/network installations. This provides information that would be less likely to be discovered by an internal MSP platform. These insights can also go a long to anticipating and preventing service problems.
Growing the present customer relationships
A MSP already has an active customer base that can be accessed for selling service and performance management. In B2B businesses, after customer acquisition, supporting the continuing needs of the customer is vital. This is actually easier to do than acquiring new customers. The MSP must maintain a good relationship with the top level customer management when they are selling service management as this is more visible than the traditional resource management.
Strengthening your customer’s loyalty
Customer loyalty is a measure of how likely your customers are to do repeat business with you. Repeat customers are your most valuable asset. Even if they are not big revenue producers, over time the revenue from them will top revenue from big one-time customers.
MSPs deliver service management that improves the customer’s IT/networks experiences, saves them time, and reduces their internal user complaints. This reduces the customer’s management costs while strengthening the customer’s loyalty and desire to continue conducting business with the MSP.
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