What is it like to be an MSP today? More competition, an ever increasing range of technical skill requirements, faster, on-demand service, more price competition and ever-rising people costs. To build a successful MSP today is going to take some different thinking. You need to find a business model that can deliver great customer support for your clients, infinite, on-demand scale and cost control.
In this Case Study, Infinite Edge CEO, Martin Haak shares how outsourcing his customer support allowed him to focus on growth and scale on demand. In just one year his revenue increased 95% and costs reduced by a third - leading to increased, sustained profitability. Here’s how he did it.
The Challenges
Infinite Edge’s story is not dissimilar from many MSPs. Martin, a dedicated business owner with a passion for technology and great customer service went through a process of hiring more staff and purchasing popular MSP software tools hoping to free up time for family and for business development activities.
Says Martin, “We had a lot of challenges particularly after our first few years in business. I’m quite technically hands on so I found myself being responsible not only for running a business but handling IT support requests at all hours. I was spending less and less time with my family due to late night and weekend demands.”
He had built incredible relationships with clients over the years but was finding many were unwilling to pay a reasonable amount for services yet still expecting all of their IT problems to be solved.
Martin hired more staff but he wasn’t happy with the quality of work that was being produced. He started buying PSA and RMM tools, yet the time required to set these systems up properly was also taking him away from customers and just adding more cost.
“All of this meant I was spending very little time on the business and almost no time in sales or reviewing customer contracts. We were doing all this work, spending more and more time managing people and trying to meet customer demands and we weren’t profitable.”
A Turning Point
Martin really began to wonder what the answer was until one of his clients suggested he consider outsourcing as a solution. So he contacted Benchmark 365 and immediately saw the value. “James and the team had already run and grown a successful MSP. We spoke about our technical and sales challenges and he listened and openly shared with me some of the ways his MSP had tackled these issues.”
“We were really surprised when they assigned us a whole team of technical and customer service staff rather than just 1 or 2 people. We went from helping our customers whenever we could find the time to giving them access to a fully staffed MSP helpdesk in a matter of days.”
Martin had hired staff before that had taken weeks or months to understand their systems but because Benchmark 365 already knew how to run an MSP they had the skills to manage Infinite Edge’s client’s infrastructure and software with minimal input from Martin’s team.
Onboarding is critical to get right. Benchmark 365 assigns a team of customer service and technical personnel to ensure everything is smooth prior to ‘go live’ including setting up a dedicated phone number, configuring of email and ticketing systems and co-developing customer documentation. The team gets to know how Infinite Edge worked, what their customers expected and how their systems were designed.
Better Customer Experiences
“Customers are happy – Benchmark 365 uses Net Promoter-like scoring tools to survey the end customer and we are consistently in the 90% range of customer satisfaction every month.”
Calls are answered every single time within 2-3 rings, a ticket is logged with detailed notes of the caller and on average most incidents are resolved within the hour. If the Benchmark 365 engineer gets an unusual customer request or needs clarification on a system change Infinite Edge is immediately notified.
More than outsourcing
Benchmark 365 is a lot more than just a NOC or a helpdesk service – they provide valuable insights and advice on which customers need the most attention and which don’t – unlocking an MSP’s full sales potential.
They analyse the types of work, the frequency of the calls and number of support tickets and the time spent on each client. They constantly share industry benchmarks as to what a customer’s true monthly value should be and that information helps deliver services in a way that gives clients the best outcome and ensures Infinite Edge is always paid for the work they do.
“Benchmark 365 were able to identify customer’s who were demanding significantly more work than they were paying for and they helped us devise a new pricing model and sales techniques that turned underperforming clients into profitable ones.”
Because the service is a pay-per-use style of service Infinite Edge only pays Benchmark 365 for work that they get paid for. Benchmark 365 reports in real time and Martin can start or stop jobs or tickets depending on whether the customer is paying us for the service or if it is included in our MSP contracts. Martin also realised it was by far more cost effective to leverage Benchmark 365’s PSA, RMM and Endpoint Security.
Says Martin, “I now spend my working hours on sales and paid consulting work and finally have more time for my family. Our company has doubled its revenue and with the cost savings from using Benchmark 365 we became profitable and have stayed profitable ever since.”
Their goal is to double revenue again in a year and with the service in place they can now work on strategic marketing initiatives targeting larger customers and specific verticals where they think they can add the most value.
“I truly feel now that we have scale we can really grow and tackle larger clients without worrying about how we’re going to deliver it activities resulting in more growth and profit.”
Guest blog courtesy of Benchmark 365. Read more Benchmark 365 blogs here.
