My journey continues in finding out how Internationally exportable service excellence is, and at the same time confirming that good managed services teams function the same globally, with the same intent to delight.
What I’ve seen is that the managed services crew at Insentra is filled with great engineers, similarly best-of-breed technology and systems, the same client expectations the world over and robust processes. The basics across people, processes, and technology are all there and must-haves like ITIL framework adoption and adherence to international standards and governance are present.
With business-critical IT systems being supported, it’s imperative that a global team of managed services engineers is intuitive and has seamless handoff between each geographic region, to allow for a true follow-the-sun capability. Service desk responsiveness is paramount across multi-channels, allowing for a call emanating in the US to be seamlessly answered in Australia or in the UK and vice versa.
So, the tech is there and there’s a supporting process to provide this functionality to the partner; is that it? In order to be a great Managed Services Provider (MSP), it’s critical to have a cultural awareness and understanding of where your partners and their clients are located. Great MSP’s want to understand these cultural differences and be sincere in their engagement and client-aware when dealing with service incidents or requests.
The second contributor to great functioning managed services teams is the relevancy of the engineers fielding the service calls and troubleshooting the incidents and tickets. How to skill up, remain relevant and keep vendor certifications up to date, is a challenge for not only the individuals within the team, but the MSP itself. It’s of critical importance that the business not only supports and encourages this technical development of its crew through its employee brand promise but invests its dollars and allocates enough training time into the continuous development and certification of the crew and leadership.
The third contributor to great functioning managed services teams is a culture within the team based on trust and integrity and a sincere passion for service excellence. If you don’t truly love helping partners and clients solve technical challenges, then this is not the game for you. I use the word love intentionally: it must burn a fire in your belly to get up in the morning and invest yourself into problem-solving and service delivery. The phone most often only rings when there is an issue. A client in need, a partner needing support. A great managed service could be seen as effective when much of the work happens behind the scenes, without the end-users being impacted or even aware, proactively picking up on trends and user behaviour, preventing outages and business-impacting events.
The next installment in this series is about partnering with business through relevant Managed Services thought leadership and having a value-adding seat at the boardroom table alongside the CIO and IT executives. I’ll look at how business can benchmark their managed services provider and confirm they are receiving value in the delivery.
Get in touch if you can, and let me know if you don’t agree?
Cheers for now,
Matt
