Keep Clients Up to Date on the Value You’re Providing

“What have you done for me lately?”

It’s an honest question that doesn’t always have an easy answer.

Fact is, you’re doing a lot of proactive work behind the scenes to prevent network disruptions and unnecessary downtime. But if you’re not heroically putting out fires in front of your clients, they might think they’re paying you for nothing. Corey Kirkendoll, CEO and president of 5K Technical Services, says:

“Once you stabilize a client’s environment, the customer sees it and says, ‘Why are we paying for managed services? Everything is working so well. It’s getting hard to cut this check.’ But they don’t understand that the reason it’s not chaotic anymore is because of the work we’re doing. We stabilize the network, so if you cut that off, you’re going to go right back to where you were. That’s the piece that they don’t understand.”

And that can cause some uncomfortable conversations come contract review time.

With Auvik, you can avoid the awkwardness by showing clients what you’re doing and keeping your services top of mind.

Let clients know you’re looking out for them

As Auvik helps you proactively monitor and manage the network, it’s constantly looking for network events that need your attention.

In a guest blog post on strategically using Auvik’s alerting capabilities, Corey says Auvik’s alerts help his MSP to be aware of issues before their clients—and that’s a win. You might be thinking, “Isn’t this just adding to the problem? I’m solving an issue and the client has no idea.”

Not quite. Corey continues:

“Receiving those customized alerts gives us information that will create tangibility in our relationships with clients. If we can visually demonstrate how the network is performing on a daily basis and make proactive changes to optimize the network, we’ll be meeting the needs of our customer and proving our value.”

You can optimize Auvik’s alerting capabilities by customizing or creating informational alerts. Since you can choose the threshold for specific alerts, you can set to proactively reach out to clients—even for things that are out of your control.

Take Auvik’s low printer ink level alert, for example. One Auvik partner uses the alert to take action before his clients make the trek to the printer to pick up their document, only to be disappointed by a blank piece of paper:

“Auvik really allows us to surprise our clients in little ways. One way—as simple as it is—is through low toner notifications. Auvik will send us alerts from a client’s printer when toner is low. We can call up the client and say, ‘We’ve noticed you’ve only got 30% of toner remaining. Would you like us to order some more?’ These little things send an important signal to our clients that we’re paying attention—but we can’t pay attention without Auvik.”

Keep track of all the work you’re doing

While you’re not going to call or email your client for every alert that comes through, it’s still important to keep track of the issues you’re solving.

When it’s time to renew your contract or organize a QBR, you don’t want your client to think you’ve just been sitting around waiting for their printers to run out of ink. Martin Jones, managing director at LAN3, says Auvik can help:

“Addressing problems before they become real issues is extremely powerful and has increased our standing with our clients. Auvik’s troubleshooting capabilities help expedite problem resolution, which makes me and my team look good during contract review sessions.”

With Auvik, you can store your network data for years and have a complete list of all the alerts you’ve addressed. And you can pull it up for your clients to show them the work you’re doing to keep their network running smoothly.

If you use a PSA like Autotask, ConnectWise Manage, or Freshdesk, you can integrate it with Auvik to turn those alerts into tickets—and log everything your team has worked on. As one Auvik partner puts it:

“Auvik’s positioned us to be a true monitoring firm and it enables us to proactively jump right onto a network device and get things corrected. In many cases, our clients may not know what we’ve done because they may not have seen the ticket come across, but they can fall back and see the tickets when we give them their summary through our portal of all the tickets that we’ve gone through.”

When you use Auvik, you can remind your clients you’re always looking out for them. It’s an easy way to make your managed services go from being a “nice to have” to a “can’t live without.”

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