Full control over Managed IT support is in our future

Hitting that sweet spot

Channel success is increasingly about delivering exactly what the customer wants, notes Fleur Doidge

According to the Rolling Stones, you can’t always get what you want. But wouldn’t it be nice to get everything you want, where and how you want, whenever you want?

Managed services, or a flavour of the same, come up again and again these days (alongside cloud) as promising to match service delivery ever more closely against customer tastes and desires. But a managed services offering can seem to stimulate a hunger that can never be satisfied. Where do you draw the line on services to be sure that services delivery does not eat up your margins and profits? Your customers feel just the same as you.

In other words, they want only what they want. And of course, what happens then is that what they want tends to vary over time and be ever-so-slightly different to what every other customer requested. And then they might all change their minds anyway.

All of this can make life very difficult for even the most customer-focused IT provider. So how does one balance the customer’s needs and desires against your own resource level, skill set and occasional need for sleep, nutrition and the like? Getting the mixture just right will help, if not ensure, you hit the long-sought-after revenue sweet spot, but not if it kills you in the process.

For the customer, where can they draw the line so that they don’t end up paying for a whole menu of services that are superfluous to requirements? Once again, clever partnering with other services providers or even with vendors, for that matter, may turn out to be a big part of the answer–particularly if the service desired is non-core to the reseller’s own business.

Third-party channel IT support services provider Comms-care has outlined what it sees as part of the ultimate answer in this Special Report. These days, Comms-care reckons that if you try something you just might find that you get what you need. I am sure you have heard that one before, once or twice, we certainly have, but that does not make it any less relevant, or less likely to be true.

Fleur Doidge is features editor at CRN

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