What is the collective end user experience of your service provider offering? In today’s application economy that is one key question that managed service providers (MSPs), telecommunications, and cloud service providers (CSPs) should ask themselves each day.
Beyond closing the deal, your relevant value is measured daily by collective end user experience. If that collective end user experience is thumbs-up, you have the opportunity to create and maintain a loyal and retained base of customers. If not, you will be dealing with annual customer attrition at renewal time.
That trajectory puts you firmly in the position of functioning as a transitional, translational and transformational application for the future trajectory of your and your customers’ businesses. Ever think that you, yourself, are an Application: the cross-functional glue that bridges organizational, cultural and mindset gaps?
Your relevance to your customers is a function of how well you communicate the business case for collective end user experience to both your company’s management as well as your customers’ C-Suite. That is the business case for quality, innovation and value realized through the applications that you provide to your customers.
In doing business with you, your customers make their own businesses more productive and profitable.
In today’s experience economy, you own the process for post-sale monitoring and measurement of collective end user experience. Even if you currently have customer service and service tech folks filling those roles, place yourself into this equation as well.
When you form your cross-functional, non-silo, post-sale monitoring and measurement team, your fingers are on the pulse of collective end user experience. You collaborate with folks sitting at various places around your organization’s business table. You understand how you create and maintain value, in real-time, versus relying on marketing communications information which is a one-size-fits-the-entire-organization initiative.
That team-centric scenario is innovative in most organizations.
Your post-sale team’s insights, and your business case for value, form a huge differentiator in the application economy. Continuously communicating these insights to end users and their decision makers allows them, in turn, to provide enhanced value to their own organizations.
The application economy is a brave new world.
Your and your customers’ organizations may still have traditional infrastructures, cultures and mindset. Those confines, however, do not need to confine your own ability to deliver relevant and valuable end user experience to the customers you serve.
You will increase the quality of your pre- and post-sale service delivery in the process.
One team I worked with decided to have a weekly virtual meetup to discuss collective end user experience. The first issue of business was building that team. To be honest, many members were reluctant. They were not used to working with one another. Their corporate culture didn’t support this type of professional cross-pollination.
One thing was certain: they were committed to understanding the collective end user experience in an innovative way. They wanted to be much more than a status quo assigned workgroup of individuals.
Yes, we opened that can of worms. We focused on habits resulting in a positive and productive mindset. The team discovered common themes in their perceptions of the end user experience. They looked forward to their weekly meetings and communicated in between meetings. The result? A higher rate of retention at renewal time, a higher rate of new customer acquisition and increased up-sell opportunities.
When you choose to utilize your own customer experience stories from real-life scenarios, you are on the way to providing innovative, high quality and enduring value to your customers. What is holding you back? Your future team awaits.
This post was brought to you by IBM for MSPs and opinions are my own.
Babette N. Ten Haken is a management strategist and team-building leadership coach. She helps teams, startups and businesses who wrestle with unpredictable revenue streams. Her Workshops and Playbooks create more productive and profitable teams in healthier organizations. Her Playbook on leadership and business strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Contact her here.
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