February 2019

MSPs: How You Should be Working with Your Client’s Internal IT Teams

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Open communication is key in creating a positive collaboration with a client's IT team.

In some cases your MSP may have to work with a company’s internal IT department. Depending on the circumstances, the IT team may be thrilled for the extra support and expertise, or they may resent you for making changes to their systems. Either way, there are ways in which you can promote positive collaboration between your firm and your client’s internal IT team.

5 Ways to Promote Synergy

  1. It is important to establish positive and friendly communication channels from the beginning of the collaboration. This way you can deal with any urgent questions from the IT team that need to be settled for a good working relationship to begin. Also, the open communication will allow you to find out a great deal about the network and the people managing it, so you can help the internal IT team more efficiently.
  2. Once open communication channels have been established, it is a good idea to be upfront and clear about what your job is and how your involvement is going to help the IT team and the company.
  3. The client’s IT team may have a different outlook on a situation than your MSP. In this case, it is important to be open to various perspectives, as it may lead to solving issues that have not been considered yet. Rather learn from each other than let egos get involved and ruin customer relations.
  4. The collaboration between you and the client’s IT department create a whole new team in itself. Therefore, it is important to create some team goals by discussing the goals of the company and then working together to figure out how to best achieve these goals.
  5. Once you have a solid foundation and game plan, it is vital to discuss and develop good processes that facilitate efficient coordination between you and the IT team. Making sure everyone understands their roles and what is expected of them is key.

Respect the internal IT team by communicating openly and often, staying goal oriented, and leaving behind any egos. In turn, the IT team will respect and perhaps come to admire your team. Additionally, having a smooth and positive collaboration can lead to more business with the company in the future, and may land you business with other companies in the same industry.

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MSPs: Going that Extra Mile for Your Clients

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ActiveImage can help you go the extra mile for your clients.

ActiveImage can help you provide the best backup and disaster recovery solutions to your clients. However, it is not only the products and solutions on offer that need to be outstanding, but the customer service and satisfaction needs to be high. Clients who have a bad experience are more likely to find another service provider. To avoid creating a reputation of bad service and stop using more and more money to find new clients, here are 5 ways to help retain your clients and ensure good customer relations.

5 Ways to Improve Customer Satisfaction

  1. Many clients want a way in which they can easily look up their current IT problem and fix it themselves, without having to wait on a technician. By providing accurate and clear self-support resources, such as newsletters on relevant topics, or an educational client portal with ‘DIY’ guides, their relationship with your MSP will improve, as they see you as a helpful and efficient service provider.
  2. Keeping to your service agreements with regards to pricing, response and expectations is vital to ensuring the client has a good experience and is happy to stay within your client base, as they are getting what they pay for.
  3. Although your service agreement outlines what your client can expect of you, there is no reason why you can’t exceed expectations, especially when it comes to fast response. Look at how logging issues or your processes of escalation can be made more efficient.
  4. Most clients are also happy to pay extra if they know they are getting premium treatment. Think of how you can package solutions and create add-ons, such as after-hours support, office supply delivery and tiered backup and disaster recovery options.
  5. It is the little things that end up making the difference and ensuring you keep your client base. Consider calling clients to chat about your service, or inviting them to regular client appreciation events. Your clients will appreciate the gesture and be happy to have you as their service provider for the foreseeable future.

It costs less to keep your customers satisfied than it does to find brand new ones. Speak to us today about how our backup and disaster recovery solutions can help you keep your customers satisfied and enable you to keep on going the extra mile for them everyday.

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MSPs: 5 Ways to Maintain Your Reputation with Clients

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A MSP thrives when clients have trust in the service provider.

Nowadays, anyone and everyone is at risk of opening a phishing email because we are all more than likely to be sent an email by a hacker at some point in our lives. Therefore, the risk is real and prevalent for any and all MSPs employees and clients. Although a professional IT technician would easily spot the difference between a malicious and harmless email, are all the employees of your MSP, no matter their experience level, able to tell the difference?

An MSP relies on its good reputation and the trust of its clients to flourish. When there is a breach, and a client’s faith in your ability to protect their and your own data is broken, it can be difficult for an MSP to recover and rebuild after such an occurrence. That’s why it is vital for MSPs to take every precaution to protect a client’s data and offer them the best in backup and disaster recovery solutions.

How to Maintain Your Reputation and Client Trust with ActiveImage

  1. Ensure that you as the MSP are covered and have an efficient and reliable backup and recovery plan in place. ActiveImage can offer you regular incremental backups, replication to multiple off site locations, and smooth, fast and reliable restores. Our variety of solutions are perfect for you and for clients in any industry.
  2. The solutions you provide need to be tailorable to your client’s industry and security needs. ActiveImage can provide you with solutions to protect clients with Windows and Linux physical machines, and virtual environments. Our product, ActiveVisor, is also a vital tool to help you manage the state of ActiveImage Protector agents to maintain system continuity, and ensure all licenses and cyber-security rules of any industry are being followed and maintained.
  3. Always continuously assess a client’s security solution, especially if it has recently received new features. ActiveImage product features allow for the ability to test whether a business is disaster ready from anywhere in a matter of minutes.
  4. Keep your clients in the loop about what new types of cyber-attacks are out there. Clients who are more aware of cyber-crime are less likely to fall for bait left out by cyber-criminals.
  5. It is important to keep your software patches up-to-date to keep hackers from finding weaknesses in your clients’ protection plans. With the ActiveImage Protector IT Pro Edition and ActiveVisor, you will be equipped with all the IT tools to keep your clients protected and have peace of mind as an MSP that your reputation is covered.

For more information on ActiveImage or any of the above mentioned products, contact us for a demo or a 30 Day free trial.

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Why Choose ActiveImage?

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If you are looking for a long term business partner, that is fully committed to you and delivers on all expectations, then ActiveImage is the partner for you.

Our years of experience in providing solutions in backup and disaster recovery proves we understand the need to provide a stable solution, unparalleled support and a profitable model.

If our promise of excellence and commitment doesn’t convince you, here are even more reasons why you should partner with us and use our products.

9 Reasons to Choose ActiveImage

  1. In the event of a disaster, your systems and company can be operational again in 5 minutes.
  2. Incremental backups are made every 5 minutes to ensure minimal impact during an outage or attack. This is a background process that occurs without interfering with the work of employees.
  3. We can protect all your systems, whether it be Windows or Linux, on physical machines and virtual environments.
  4. Our products and services allow replication of data to any off site or Cloud location, another office, local target or a network location via (secure) FTP and WebDAV. These services also allow you to easily manage your backup retention policy and consolidate your backup chains to ensure smooth, reliable and fast restores.
  5. We are able to apply your business continuity strategy to ensure your backups and recovery plans are working by booting a recovered machine in 2 minutes from any full or incremental backup file.
  6. We provide flexible restore, migration and failback across many platforms (P2P, P2V, V2V, V2P)
  7. Our deduplication is inline and has minimal impact on backup and restore performance.
  8. Instant availability solutions allow you to access your data and systems in a few minutes at a fraction of the cost of high availability solutions.
  9. We offer our instant disaster recovery solutions as an addition to existing backup solutions.

It’s easy to become a ActiveImage partner, all you have to do is visit our partners page and fill in your details to receive more information, or you can find out more about our products and services that you are interested in by requesting a 30 day trial or a demo.

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