6 Reasons a Self-Service Portal Promotes Stronger MSP Relationships

How do you balance meeting your customer’s unique and complex IT infrastructure needs with convenient, efficient, and seamless service delivery and support?  

Here, we explore how a self-service portal, built with MSPs top of mind, can help you to streamline your business processes and optimize your customer’s all-round experience and relationship with your company and brand.  

1. 90% of customers expect a self-service portal  

The vast majority (90% of customers, according to a 2017 Microsoft survey) expect a company or organization to offer them a self-service portal. A successful self-service portal is, therefore, a great way to meet customer needs and strengthen your brand reputation.  

2. Customers often prefer to perform simple functions themselves 

Some tasks, such as flexing software license quantities or renewing a subscription, are more straightforward for the customer to do themselves. Customers ultimately want convenience rather than a long back and forth of e-mail requests or tickets for changes that can they can complete in minutes from a self-service portal.  

3. Customers crave cost transparency  

One of the main reasons customers outsource their IT is operational cost reduction and control. Because cost efficiency is so critical, it’s important to be able to provide customers with a clear and accurate breakdown of their cloud billing and consumption costs. A quality self-service portal that’s customized to manage cloud services can sync with vendor portals to provide your customers with a granular view of their spending. 

4. Customers want more accessible spending controls   

While cost reduction is a common reason why many enterprises move to cloud, many promptly run into difficulty tracking and forecasting their cloud usage. A self-service portal that includes the inbuilt tools customers need to manage their costs can fix this easily. Cloudmore, for example, enables MSPs to set pre-agreed spending limits and percentage spend notifications. The system also uses the data supplied by the customer’s current and historical spending to forecast future expenditure.  

5. Customers want a reliable online source for service-related questions 

MSPs are highly trusted sources of IT expertise. A self-service portal is a great way to share this knowledge and guide your customers to answers that will help them resolve their questions quickly. A well-designed online knowledge base also helps your business to advertise the full extent of your industry expertise, which boosts your brand credibility.   

6. Customers can manage their IT estate   

Some self-service portals, like Cloudmore, enable the customer to see precisely how different software is being used across their organization—by which departments, business units, and individuals. This top-down view empowers the customer to see if existing licenses should be upped or reduced in  quantity or  reassigned so that no software goes unused and everyone gets the tools that they need.   

Wrap-up 

Ultimately, every MSP wants to deliver a remarkable customer experience. A self-service portal is one way to support that. It simplifies the customer’s buying experience and reduces the frictions that may arise from poor cost visibility or slow provisioning and account management. A self-service portal saves time, labor, and resources. It also gives your team deeper insights into your customer’s buying behaviour, allowing staff to target customer needs better and offer a much-improved white-glove experience. 

For more information download our guide that explores how you can help your customers to achieve better IT efficiency and business transformation.