EP220 – Improving Service Delivery in your MSP with Michelle Coombs & Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we're going to help you improve your service in 2025.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million and if already there, get to 5 and go fast. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. Today, we've got a very special guest. We have Michelle Coombs in the house today. Good morning, Michelle. How you doing?

MICHELLE: Hi Ian, how are you?

IAN: I am very good. Thank you. Very good. Today, we are talking to Michelle about service improvement planning. We've got a really interesting period coming up. We're at the beginning of 2025. We've got some changes to the way that business operate in terms of increased cost of taxation, all that sort of jazz coming up after March We're already hearing that people are having clients squeaking a little bit about – I don't know if I can afford this, I don't know if I can see the value in it. And all those kind of good things. And we know that the number one reason why people leave an MSP I think, is because of poor service. They don't get back to me...

MICHELLE: You know what they do, Ian, is they actually turn around and say, it's too expensive. But what they actually mean is, we're not seeing the value that you're delivering.

IAN: 100%, 100%. So we're going to crush all of that today and we're going to get, we're going to dive into Michelle's incredible brain and this expertise and we're going to pull out all the golden nuggets to help you with it. But, just in case Michelle Coombs, Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do? And who do you help?

MICHELLE: So I'm Michelle Coombs. I'm a Performance Improvement Specialist. I love that term, Tech Leader Network is the business name and I help managed service providers improve their service.

IAN: Fantastic. So let's just, let's kick straight into it. We talk a lot about, the way to do service improvement, the way to have a really great service desk is around people, process and technology. Okay, but these are all little buzzwords and it's all very easy to roll off the tongue and this is what we need to do. But what should an MSP really be focusing in when we're talking about the people, when we're talking about the process and we're talking about the tech in terms of this service improvement?

MICHELLE: Ah, Ian, you've already got my goat going because you've said people, process, technology. We've missed out two crucial factors, which are leadership and customer, because if you don't have the leadership guiding you in the direction and making sure your performance reviews are done and that you've got the right metrics in place and you've got the right bums on seats and stuff like that, you're not going to go in any direction. You'll all be going off all over the place. And if you don't focus on your customer is king, right? You don't focus on them what they're going to say.

IAN: So where does the leadership let's dive into the leadership side of things then, because we know that this is topic that's very close to you and my heart. And this could lengthen this podcast out to about four hours. But just before we get too far into it, where does leadership fit into serving, delivering great customer service.

MICHELLE: So this is one is about, and you talk about this all the time and about having those values and making sure your people are aligned to those values and making sure your customers are the right fit for your business so that you don't have those mismatch of alignments and values. So that's taken it from the very, very high level to the thousand foot view. But when you're getting down into the detail, it's making sure that your service teams are delivering what they say they're going to deliver. So if you've got customers and you've got a commitment in place, a contractual commitment to deliver a service or incident management within X number of hours. It's making sure that's in place and then getting your teams to report up to board to say, this is how we're doing or it could be that you tell them and set the goals for the cost per ticket. So you know how much your service is costing you. So it's all of that kind of stuff, really.

IAN: Excellent. So obviously people's about the team, is it the process is around, when we get caught up with the process, right? Talk to MSPs about process, right? And, we're on a long, slippery road here. Do MSPs complicate the whole service delivery the whole improvement thing? Should they start at a higher level? How do they know that their process is working in this area?

MICHELLE: It depends on the size of the MSP, right? So if we look at a smaller MSPs first, they typically don't have anything documented and they let the staff do whatever they want to be doing. In terms of just get it fixed is the key word. There's no repeatability. You can't scale off that. People do different things and you're going to get different results. Whereas on the far end of the scale, where you've got those more mature MSPs, they've got very well documented processes to the point where if you don't follow a change process and you cause a customer an outage, you can end up like on a disciplinary for it, so there's got to be the right balance for the size of the MSP, but making sure particularly as we talk about things like scalability and repeatability, you've got to have something in place, even if it's just like a... for the tiny MSPs, where it's three, four, five people, even if you're just recording your process step by step on Teams or using Guide or Scribe or something like that, those tools just to give the walkthrough and the step by step instructions of what they need to do.

IAN: For MSPs listening here, they're all saying, I'm sure, I've got great service delivery, don't know why I need to worry about this. I think we're doing really well, we don't lose many customers tickets are low, a way we go. What's a quick way for an MSP to take a temperature gauge on whether they are delivering customer service? And I know you've got the little smiley faces and all of that kind of thing. But what's some of the headlines that you have in the top of your mind when you talk to people that you go 123? Are you doing these things?

MICHELLE: So the first one is, as you say, on the end of every ticket. Now we know not everybody fills them in. So that's not a problem. But you get what you get from that, but it's in the moment. Then when you have your service delivery reviews or TBRs, QBRs, whatever you want to call them, absolutely make sure that you are asking. What did we do? What can we do better? You only have to ask those two questions, right? So what do we do? What do we do better? You can also take that and use it in your marketing as well. Which I think is something that MSPs think they're going to get a kick in because they've not delivered right, or they can't see the purpose of it. But it's not just making sure that the service is delivered correctly, but you can use that collateral across multiple facets of the business. And then the third thing, what would I say after the end of every project? Do a temperature gauge if you're doing a implementation project, but not in service.

IAN: So if you're not doing those three things and I talk to MSPs and they go, no, we don't really do CSAT and we every now and then we do, the account management QBRs and we don't do a roll up at the end of it, then you need to go back and listen to the beginning of this podcast all over again. Okay, so that's the headlines, that's how we know CSATs. TBR is good account management, end of a project, have a bit of a wrap up, lessons learned, that sort of thing. So that's a great little focus to get in. Where should they focus first? They've got the metrics in place. They're going to start doing that and that's going to tell a bit of a story, isn't it? But where should they focus first?

MICHELLE: Good one. First of all, if they've done all the CSAT and the account management and the project mop ups, they'll get a list from their customers. They should absolutely be the priorities, right? So, that's always a good place to start. If you are insistent that if they are insistent that they're not going to do CSAT till they've got something in place and then get a baseline after six month, then I would suggest that they sit down and take a good, hard, long look at their business and how they deliver their service, sit and observe the service. Let's go and sit and observe what's going on. Listen to the phone calls, look at the ticket quality, make sure that you're capturing all of that information. Look at the tonality of the emails that are coming back when they've finished a ticket from the customer. Oh, do they sound okay? Wow, thanks. That's amazing. Or is it cheers? That's done and then close it off. So what is the kind of tonality of coming from the customer? So it's taking a good, long, hard look at your service desk and look at it objectively rather than looking at it as your baby, because we all know we love our babies, right?

IAN: That's one way to put it. I'm sure that Some of the MSPs I'm speaking to don't talk about their service desk in those sort of terms...

MICHELLE: It should be, it is their baby, service is the best bit of the whole business in my mind, but hey ...

IAN: Of course it is. So an MSP has done that, they there's a few little gaps, and now they've realised that they actually need The service improvement plan, they need to have a specific project task list program, whatever you want to call it plan, improve their service delivery and probably I think to cement this process together so that everybody knows what they're doing. So it's not all just a bottleneck for the main business owner. Who should own this? Should this be the business owner? Should it be lead helpdesk manager? I know it depends on the size of the business, but where's your view on that point?

MICHELLE: Let's do it from both angles then because if it's a smaller MSP, it's absolutely going to be owner lad because their owner operator, they do absolutely everything up to about size 10 people. But when they start putting those team leaders in place and that management structure in place, get it across to your lower cost hands, the owner doesn't do it, but the help desk manager would. They can then, and make sure you give them the resources they need to do this. So if they need access to the owner or they need access to the project managers, or they need access to service desk resources to do something that's not a service ticket. Give them those resources and let them implement it because otherwise you're just going to set them up for failure. If you don't...

IAN: Talking about failure, it must do this at some point or another. I'm absolutely certain. Where does service improvement plans go wrong? Where do they get stuck?

MICHELLE: Should I get myself comfy for this? (...) It’s Pareto's principle, they get 80% of the way there and then something else shiny comes along and they give up on that last 20% which actually could be the bit that turns the needle then you've got things like people not having the time and the resources to implement That's another one. The other one is the unknown unknowns. They think they know what they're capturing, but they don't and they don't take it out to the customer and get that customer feedback, they don't engage their teams. That's another thing you should be doing is absolutely getting your team's feedback on how they see the service or how they deliver the service. The other is like admin stuff, like 20 odd spreadsheets, all doing the same thing, but with different versions, different updates. And then they spend and waste hours trying to figure out which is the latest spreadsheet we should be working on. What's the latest update? They don't update it as they should, like when you've got a project that's just going off track because your project manager is not giving you a decent project status report. There's none of that happening. Yeah, all of those kinds of things here. I'll leave it at that.

IAN: Leave it at that, otherwise we'll be going off now. We talked about people. which is operating the system right at the beginning, which is the most important thing. However and we were talking about this yesterday in one of our peer groups, we were talking about you've got to, and you've mentioned it and people are going to yawn, define the vision, the mission the culture, because if you don't explain things clearly enough then the rest of your team are not going to know why you're doing something. Why have we got to do this service improvement plan? I'm all right. I'm closing my tickets. No one's complained about me, right? So I must be brilliant, right? What's some of the best ways that you've known that MSPs can help implement change and get their teams engaged in a new service improvement an initiative in the business?

MICHELLE: You touched on it earlier. It literally just now when you said why and I'll come back to that in a moment.

So first thing to do is absolutely get them all on board because as I said, you get that feedback from the team of what they feel is going well, what could be done better. They want you to succeed as well, right? 'cause they want to keep the jobs. So they want everything to be right, but when it comes to getting the team on board, if you look at the different learning styles that you've got out there, you have your why's, your what's, your how's, and your what if kind of people. So you need to approach any kind of change when you're bringing your team along and cover all of those four aspects and in that specific order, because if you don't capture the why people right at the very beginning, they're out. But if you make that why too long about why you're doing something, the how people have switched off and they're already trying to figure out how they're going to do it and they're not paying any attention to the what, which is all that procedural stuff. And like the key information that they need to be able to implement the how. And then the what ifs are the trial by error kind of people, but they need all of that information to get to that point. So making sure that you structure your message in the right way. Something slightly different. It's definitely not a service delivery topic. That is it, Ian. But yeah, if you want to bring people on board and up to speed, that's the way to deliver a message.

IAN: Absolutely love it. We've understood that, you know what, there's a few areas in my service delivery that we can improve here. We've realized that there's a couple of, we've got the three areas, TBRs, the account management and the project reviews that we need to do. And we've got the process, we're going to build it into the team. So it's all good. We're good to go. We're good to cracking on, but. In your view, what is the real secret source to keeping a long term relationship with a customer? Because just to dig in a little bit deeper on that for the minute, I think a lot of MSPs get complacent because of the, it's hard to move MSP, right? But when they move, they've already decided to move. And the chances of you u-turning that ship are pretty much zero because they've already decided. And it's always a bit of a surprise. Oh, didn't know that was going to happen. And normally it's followed by the fact of there's no account management behind it. However what's your view on how we can really make sure we get a really good, deep, long term relationship and a proper long term relationship with our clients.

MICHELLE: It's that relationship building. It's always about the relationships. And when I hear that they do, when an MSP does an annual review, and that's literally at the point they want them to sign the contract, like you say, it's too late. Why they're not meeting at least quarterly, in my mind, it should be quarterly. The first thing you do when you're on board a new customer, you say what's our cadence? How often are we going to meet the third Thursday of every month at 10 o'clock? That is your hour. You can reach me at any time. 10 o'clock we'll come in, we'll talk about how the service is going, we'll talk about your strategy. Obviously there is a bit of like sales and upsell in there for if there's any white space analysis and gaps that you've identified and all of that kind of stuff. But make it about the service and the relationship and just build that relationship, that's the key one.

The other one is setting very clear expectations. So when you're onboarding your customer, making sure that you've got things like a welcome pack. And when I say a welcome pack, it defines everything. It tells them what their SLAs are going to be. It tells them how to log tickets on the portal, who to escalate to, how to raise a complaint. Yes, you don't want complaints, but welcome them because that's your opportunity to put stuff right while it's in flight rather than when you're doing your renewal So clear expectations, reset your customer's expectations. If they start to take the Michael language polite there and then do what you say you're going to do. When you've said something, do it. If, and if it's like you've run the service desk and you say, I'll get back to you by Friday and it's Thursday afternoon before you say Friday, just think is that going to be realistic if a P1 hits or something like that? Am I better off saying I'll get back to you Tuesday and know that you'll be delivering Monday morning at the latest. So have a think about how you can best deliver and do what you say you're going to do.

IAN: Do you know that phrase is very close to my heart. Michelle, when I was, I think it was when I was 26 was when I started my Life in leadership, and I was working for what is now Virgin Media. We were building the network back in the day, and I wasn't promoted to a manager. It was, supervisor and then junior man and all that sort of things as you were building up. And I've got, I thought this is quite good, quite and one of my bosses, he turned around to me and he said those words to me, he said, Oh, this is really easy. And all you need to do is. do what you say you're going to do, he says. Now, that doesn't mean do everything everybody else wants you to do. What it means is that if you've got a call, and this is a great, just a leadership foundation that if you're going to say you're going to get someone back to someone at nine o'clock on a Friday and you haven't got the answer, still get back to them and just tell them that I haven't got the answer yet, blah, blah, blah. But as soon as you don't do what you say you're going to do, we're going off on a tangent now, trust and report erodes straight away. And that's the issue.

MICHELLE: You're not going off on a tangent at all, though, if you think about it, because who are the people that connect with your customers more than the account manager – Service desk teams, the people that are answering the phone or doing the emails and the tickets, right? So it absolutely applies to them. It's not just a leadership message. It is a message for everybody.

IAN: What gets overlooked, because that just seems like a really straightforward kind of process and analogy, and this is what we need to do with our relationships, but what are some of the things where you talk to your clients, you go, oh, have you not done that? And they go, oh, no, we didn't think it was important. Oh, we've missed that bit out. What are some of the Michael McIntyre moments where you just go, oh, damn, did I not do that?

MICHELLE: There are quite a few, and I'm just thinking which I can share and which I can't share. But probably one of the best ones that I have, particularly when the owner operated and growing is they've got a ticketing process. And as part of that ticketing process, say they need to log it to vendor. Now because the owner has been doing most of the tickets for the longest amount of time, they're the ones that are permitted to log a call with and for example, because their email address is registered with them, but that adds a bottleneck as they grow and they get their service teams behind them. If every ticket for a third party vendor has to go through the owner, it's got to wait till the owner's available to log the ticket or provide the updates and vice versa. It just adds in that. So make sure that all of your team members, either a shared mailbox, so support at msp.com, can log a ticket direct with the vendor, or every, if it's a named account, every single person on your service desk can raise tickets with the vendors and make it part of your staff onboarding process. The accounts must be set up with all the vendors.

IAN: That's a good shout actually. Yeah, you can see that getting stuck there, can't you? Which is not what you want at all.

MICHELLE: Particularly if they're off playing golf on a day, and it's like getting interrupted by a phone call. Yeah, they're not going to like that.

IAN: Exactly. Let's spend a couple of minutes talking about low noise clients.

MICHELLE: Low noise?

IAN: Low noise clients, yeah.

MICHELLE: Green flag clients, as I call them. You got red flag, green flag.

IAN: Green flag... Quiet clients.

MICHELLE: That's what it is.

IAN: You've got smaller clients that you don't really have much to do with them. They don't really have much to do with it. Everyone's all happy because it all moves forward. And many people go they don't need anything, so I don't need to contact them and anything like that. And they also, and I do agree with this is that, if you have got a small, maybe a five seat, customer on an MSP, you're not going to be doing a QBR because it's not good use of your time to go into the full depth into that sort of thing. What's some of the best practices for, the lower or the green flag clients, as you say, the clients who are just not really needy or anything where you just want to keep them up to date with what's going on, any advances, but you don't want to appear to be salesy. ‘Cause that's what we hear a lot, he goes, oh, they're just going to ring me and sell me something. And that's not, they feel really awkward about that. Don't they?

MICHELLE: Yeah. So for me, it's, I would get my team leaders and my help desk managers to call the customers. Once a month and just check in how things it's a team lead here from MSP And I just want to see how things are going everything. Okay, anything else we can help you with anything not going as well So you can do that CSAT kind of question those see, TBR questions as you're calling them, on the phone call from help desk manager to key contact. And it still helps build that relationship as well, because it's still a nice touch point and nice friendly one. That's purely service related.

IAN: Yeah. You just bring it up, just checking in, see how it's going and you don't have to do it as well, which is brilliant. And that's the whole thing with the account management process is it's not just yours as the business owner to own. It's everybody's, to take it different depths and different touch points. Brilliant stuff.

MICHELLE: Before you move on from that point though, you want to train your team leaders and your help desk managers or whoever is making those calls to be on the listen out for projects that are upcoming so that they can alert you and let you know, actually they're thinking of doing this in six months. You might want to reach out before they go and get the telecoms elsewhere or something like that. So make sure to train to listen out.

IAN: Michelle, that's absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much for your time today. That was a jam packed, rather fast podcast, but bucket loads of values and tips and tricks. And probably for most MSPs who are listening to this, just some nice, healthy reminders to... Bye. Maybe I just need to check in on this or maybe I just need to check in on that. But just before we end the show, I'll always love to say what's the top three things that people need to take away from the show and the actions that they need to take to go and improve their service delivery in their MSP.

MICHELLE: Hope you don't ask every guest that same question and the service delivery side is aimed at me Ian. The top three tips are customer satisfaction, go engage that, ask the customers at the very least what you do well. What you can do better. Teams, ask them what they think's going and ask what they can, what as a business we can do better and also ask them if they've got any ideas that could be a value add because you never know what they've got hidden up their sleeves. And the third one would be build those relationships. Doesn't matter if they're tiny make sure you've got a way of keeping those touch points throughout the life cycle of that contracted period. Even if it's just your help desk manager picking up the phone and seeing what's going on.

IAN: Fantastic. Thank you again, Michelle. If anybody wants to improve and dig in a little bit deeper on some of the things that we mentioned today how do they get in contact with you, Michelle? What's the best way to get hold of you?

MICHELLE: Either through LinkedIn or emailing Michelle@thetechleader.net.

IAN: Brilliant stuff. I know that you have got some really exciting things planned for this year yourself with your business to help more MSPs So get hold of Michelle and find out what that is all about and I wish you all the success for 2025 within that and I'm sure I will be bumping into you very shortly at an event When they get cracking again.

MICHELLE: Yeah. Oh god. Yeah I think I might be your I don't think I'm your neighbor there again this year

IAN: At the MSP show

MICHELLE: Yeah, don't think I'm your neighbour... I made sure there was one.

IAN: You made sure there was some, you made sure that's probably just because I ate all the sweets on your stand.

MICHELLE: You did, yeah, absolutely.

IAN: Anyway, never mind. Lovely stuff. Thanks again Michelle good luck and we will catch up with all the rest of you on the next show.

OUTRO: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, just before you go. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engaging along your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best.