Trust: bottle it and you have the world’s best business.
Sticky customers, zero churn, guaranteed growth.
Trouble is, all too often in business, trust is absent.
Too many enterprises are dazzled by impressive promises bound-up in Service Level Agreements, only to discover down the line that they are, at best, over-blown and, at worst, empty.
The reality is that establishing trust is as much about a culture as it is about a set of contractual deliverables.
To add to the challenge, trust between service providers and their customers is becoming increasingly hard to build into the relationship.
But, in a world where IT complexity continues to grow– and where commoditisation routinely stifles differentiation – it seems trust is the latest currency that really counts.
Indeed, for managed service providers, it’s the holy grail, and here’s why.
The challenge of trust
At its best, the service provider to enterprise relationship is one of mutual benefit and continuing growth.
However, through a lack of communication and visibility, an initial grace period at the beginning of the relationship is often followed by a steadily declining level of trust, resulting in the enterprise moving on to another provider at the end of the contract period.
“Without care, too many MSP and enterprise relationships become adversarial as opposed to collaborative,” says Peter Savereux, Marketing Executive at UK Service Assurance experts Highlight.
“If trust dissolves, it can become a little like gamesmanship, where each entity is trying to leverage the available resources for their own ends.
“For example, MSPs are often not very good at being totally transparent when it comes to the performance of their products because they lack the tools for service managers to show network data in a way that is relevant or understandable to their customers. They don’t want negativity to affect a service contract renewal.
“Similarly, dissatisfied enterprise customers often resent the contractual constraints that prevent them from insisting on better performance from their MSP, especially when they feel that reporting from their service provider is opaque.
“The optimal state is for the service provider to feel like a trusted additional member of an enterprise in-house IT team.
“Sadly, in the absence of visibility and collaboration, neither entity gets that feeling.”
