What makes a great IT service partner?

Good morning everyone. I recently attended an event on brand identity. The speaker was the global brand manager of a well known professional services company. After spending millions of pounds, he came to the same conclusion as me: a brand is created by each customer's experience with the company.

His research also matched my belief about what customers expect from a great professional services company. This blog highlights these three key expectations.

First, customers want suppliers to invest time with them and to really understand their business challenges.
In an effort to cut costs, many IT suppliers have standardised everything and hoped you fit into one of their boxes. The penny pinchers out there love this idea because it takes cost out of your operation. However, as a customer, this approach leaves you feeling like “I am just a number”. When I designed Arbutus Ridge’s customer experience, I built no less than three face to face visits with each new customer into the process. I believe it takes that investment of time to truly understand the challenges you face and to design an IT system that meets your immediate business goals.

Second, customers want suppliers to proactively suggest improvements.
Similar to the first point, many IT suppliers claim to work with you. The truth however, is that with a “cookie cutter” business model, it is not in their best interest to do so. The less time they spend with you, the more money they make from your monthly service fee. Equally, if your IT supplier only does something when you ask for it, you are justified in thinking they are hardly being proactive. The Arbutus Ridge team makes regular contact with our customers. We have a brief chat about the projects they are working on and where they are experiencing bottlenecks. More often than not, the system they have can be modified to solve the bottleneck with very little effort. Best of all, there is usually no additional fee for our proactive approach to helping you get more value from what you already own. For me, being proactive means helping you even when there isn’t an invoice attached to doing so.

Third, customers want suppliers to use all of the resources at their disposal to create value for them.
Many IT suppliers focus on what they deliver and not much else. The idea of bringing in a partner organisation is only considered if they can make a margin on it. Some people might think this is a good idea, but if I was the person paying for the service, I would not be too happy to learn that a solution to my problem existed, but my IT supplier didn’t tell me about it because there was nothing in it for them. Arbutus Ridge is a small and growing company. We are more than happy to recommend third parties who are better placed to help you. That is of course what being a trusted IT partner is all about. In addition, despite our size, we have an unusually large international network. Within our team, we speak 5 languages and we have relationships with partners around the world whom we can call on for help with your project. If you need it, we will make the call.

The Result
If these are the three things customers of IT/professional services want, what are they actually buying? The answer is remarkably simple: Confidence in their IT decisions. It’s worth noting this is very different from off-loading your IT system risk to a third party. These discerning customers want to be in control of their business and to know the decisions they take are good ones. Arbutus Ridge’s Jumpstart™ IT Service packages are designed to do exactly that.

So where does this leave us. If you want a trusted IT partner who understands you, is proactively helping you and has access to a wide range of expertise, please feel free to contact me for a chat. You never know what we could discover.

Regards,

Barry Larson
http://www.arbutusridge.co.uk
Better systems for your business™