Most managed service providers (MSPs) follow a similar process for onboarding new customers for managed services. This typically starts with understanding your customer’s true business needs and then reflecting those needs and the required services into your service delivery platform.
Sounds like a straightforward approach, yet the reality is often not so easy or quick. Customers have unique needs based on the nature of their organization and current IT infrastructure. This can transform onboarding into a complicated, multi-step process.
For example, how much of a priority is the stability and uptime of one group of devices versus another group or what security precautions need to be put in place to protect your customers? How will the answers to these questions and others effect which aspects of the remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution you turn on and which you leave off?
Today’s RMM solutions are extremely powerful, but all too often it is that power that breeds complexity. This requires MSPs to commit a lot of time to configuring, tweaking, twisting and covering the necessary checkboxes at exactly the right stage.
One MSP recently told me that he has a 35-40 item checklist to complete in order to onboard a customer and begin delivering services. Managed services platforms are meant to simplify your lives and make it easy to deliver service to your customers – 40 steps toward implementation isn’t a simplified experience.
With so many checkboxes and onboarding steps, one moment’s distraction is all it takes for a step to be missed and suddenly your RMM solution isn’t fulfilling the necessary criteria. Complicating this, as the IT provider, you are still on the hook with the customer to deliver the services you committed to initially. And now you need to rely on manual processes to satisfy those needs. This starts an endless cycle of firefighting as customers’ IT needs grow and more and more manual processes pile up.
We have a plan to change this.
Next month, AVG Business will release a next generation RMM platform focused on a new service delivery model that allows you to standardize the configuration and onboarding of multiple customer sites. This will dramatically minimize the implementation steps required for the customer onboarding process as well as achieve a standardized service delivery model.
For the first time, the channel will have access to an innovative RMM solution that will give them a centrally planned and automated mechanism to cover those checkboxes and implement services, upgrades or changes in simple, applied way.
This type of centralized automation delivers amazing benefits. Imagine the ability to deliver unique service offerings within one standardized service delivery platform. Your clients will gain a scalable solution to address their security challenges. You will gain the tools to retain new clients, onboard those clients quickly and grow your revenue.
Tune in next month to find out more about the new platform and how you can add it to your security product portfolio.
