Hiring a managed service provider (MSP) can be highly beneficial for your business if you want to scale up or remain competitive while trying to achieve a long-term operational flow. The value of partnering with an MSP is already well-known by IT professionals. Still, it is also essential to establish what they bring to your business by measuring their effectiveness and usefulness to the company.
They say you can’t manage what you can’t measure, which also holds in quantifying the impact of managed IT services Dallas on your business. This is why it is crucial to establish the metrics early on in the partnership to quantify any progress happening. Relevant metrics must help companies focus on elements that drive business and aid them in achieving their strategic goals.
This article discusses three metrics that determine the value of managed IT partnerships.
Return On Investment
One of the essential metrics you should know when partnering with an MSP is the return on investment (ROI). It is vital to understand expenses to help a business monitor its budget and increase profits. Thus, tracking the ROI of partnering up with an MSP is crucial so you can justify the cost of hiring them with the profit they bring in.
How exactly do MSPs contribute to the ROI of businesses when their impact is less intuitive than marketing and sales-driven strategies?
1. MSPs are known to handle portions of maintenance, monitoring, and support to in-house IT departments. The free-up of responsibilities shouldered by the in-house IT department allows them to focus on strategic initiatives, implement new solutions, and explore new technologies that will augment the company’s ROI.
2. Downtimes may cost organizations millions of dollars, especially when there is a substantial service interruption. MSPs are hired to help prevent this problem by monitoring the network for threats, rolling out updates, and resolving issues.
3. MSPs may be able to boost your ROI by charging your business only when you need the services they offer, such as maintenance, support, and monitoring. The flexibility of this business model is more cost-effective and provides higher ROI than maintaining an in-house IT department.
Knowledge Value
Imagine pitting a six-man team against a whole company with hundreds of employees. This is what hiring an MSP feels like—having a battalion of resource people ready to give their support behind you. One of the valuable things an MSP brings to your table is access to a vast source of skills, knowledge, and experience, which are highly beneficial for your business.
It is important to note that technology is a facet in businesses that can be difficult to track and monitor due to the rapid changes that happen every day. Keeping up with these developments means spending on your employees’ training, a strategy that can be expensive since these technologies change every year.
Another thing worth comparing is the services made available to your business and your customers. Hiring an individual means paying for his skills and knowledge, which may be limited compared to what end-to-end managed IT services can offer. You get your money’s value by paying only when you need to access these services, instead of paying for someone’s 40-hour work week, which has fewer productivity results.
Customer Satisfaction
Apart from increasing a company’s ROI, one of the things you should know about your MSP partnership is its influence on your customers’ satisfaction. Keeping a good relationship with your customers is also essential and economical.
Customer satisfaction is impacted by the timeliness in resolving issues and the quality of your service or products from your business. Keep in mind that lead generation costs more than keeping your current customers happy and satisfied. Loyal customers also make for a good source of referrals with little to no cost.
An example can be providing 24/7 support to your customers. One of the quantifiable things that impact your customer satisfaction rating is your company’s average resolution time, which is how fast you resolve your customers’ problems. Having a support team who can cater to your customers any time of day adds points to your customer satisfaction metric.
Wrapping Up
Running a business means keeping an eye on all facets that improve your services without blowing your budget. Understanding these metrics is the key to assessing your business’s strengths and weaknesses as objectively as possible.
To stand out in a competitive marketplace means being methodological and practical when making adjustments and improving your operations. If you want to grow your business in a shorter period while achieving long-term operational flow, these MSP metrics will get you there.