Brainlink’s Raj Goel showed Continuum Navigate attendees his best practices for increasing service quality, gaining new clients, and achieving greater success in the business world.
In today’s business world, even the clients you’ve been working with for years could leave at any moment, because your competitors just won’t stop calling them.
New offers, unbeatable deals, and free first-time services will all make your clients question whether it’s worth staying with you or trying out your competitor. That’s why it’s so important for you to understand how to show your clients that you’re the best, and the only option for them.
Brainlink founder and CTO Raj Goel did just that at the Continuum Navigate 2017 Conference in early October. Held in Las Vegas from October 2nd – 5th, the event brought together key Continuum partners and industry leaders to share their best practices for increasing quality of service, netting more sales, and growing the client base.
In his presentation, Raj talked real tactics that he and Brainlink uses to keep clients hanging up on the competition. Best practices include:
Solving Problems with Continuum Network Operations Center
If you’re going to partner with Continuum, make sure that you and your team know how to use it properly. The key to optimizing your Continuum use is with their Network Operations Center (NOC). As a part of the Continuum IT management platform, this solution offers you industry-leading training and technology capabilities to support your business in ticket resolution and other aspects of managed IT services.
The Power of SOPs
Standard Operating Procedures are your way to document any given process in your business’ operation, from macro tasks like budget development, to daily rudimentary duties like sales pitches. By documenting every single possible aspect of your business, you develop a culture of SOPs that will minimize your time and money invested in a given action, and maximize the quality, and therefore, profit. Benefits include:
- Customer Satisfaction: More than familiarity, your clients want consistency, and that’s precisely what SOP culture can offer you. Implementing well-defined SOPs for each and every task a technician could carry out for a client ensures that there’s no guesswork, no human error, and no difference in the quality of work between one technician and another.
- Greater Return on Investment: SOPs can drastically cut the time of any given task within your business’ operations. From hiring and training to marketing and budgeting, SOPs take once-tedious tasks and allow you and your employees to perform them on autopilot, without risk of careless mistakes. Once you’ve initiated your business’ own SOP culture, you’ll quickly see the time spent on tasks cut down to as much as a tenth of the original time invested.
- Do More With Less: Whereas some companies employ entire teams and even departments to handle operations, we can get it done with a fraction of the personnel, all thanks to SOP culture. As a seven-person IT firm, we have attracted the attention and gained the business of massive clients from the likes of 800+ member hedge fund IT consultancies because we can do it just as well as they can, but with only a fraction of the workforce and time invested.
How Culture Beat Strategy Every Time
SOP Culture will replace the need for strategy by dictating how each and every task is performed in the name of your business. Once properly implemented, it isn’t long before these standardized processes become second nature to your brand new hires and experienced veterans alike. Remember: strategies have to be followed, updated and ever-present in the minds of your team in order to be effective. On the other hand, culture is baked into everything your business does, ensuring a consistent effect in every task your staff undertakes.
Invest In Your Vendors
You’re using their solutions, after all, so why wouldn’t you do everything you can to make sure your team can use them to their greatest potential?
Whether it’s Connectwise, Autotask, Webroot, MalwareBytes, Datto, Sophos, Microsoft, Cisco, or whoever else, you’ve chosen to make them a key aspect of your business’ daily work. They play a role in the quality and timeliness of your services, and therefore, the way your clients perceive your business. That’s why it’s so important to invest in them:
- Get your staff trained on their products by their representatives
- Make sure you attend their conferences
- Read up on their blogs and news updates to ensure you know what they’re doing to stay competitive
Standardize Staff Training
One of the many ways SOP Culture can help your business is by standardizing your hiring and training processes. Many businesses like yours struggle to ensure a consistent and fiscally worthwhile training procedure for the new employees they bring in; with SOP Culture, you won’t have to struggle any longer.
Through detailed and effective documentation, you can overhaul your training methods to achieve a number of benefits, including:
- Reduced costs for the hiring and training of new staff members.
- A consistent knowledge base and skill set across your entire staff.
- A more immediate and notable return on the investment you make in new employees.
Train Your Clients Too
Regardless of how well trained, your staff is, efficiency will continue to bottleneck as soon as your reach the client-end of the services, especially if you aren’t taking the time to show them how everything works. It’ll take some time upfront, but in the long run, it’ll speed up the support process:
- Provide links to SOPs for every ticket so that your clients see how problems are solved.
- Send end-user SOPs to clients so that they don’t have to rely on you to answer simple questions — how to set up the phone, how to set an Outlook signature, etc. — time and time again.
Truly effective best practices come down to a simple idea: further, invest in the resources you’re already paying for. Spend a little more time and a little more money on your staff, your vendors, and your clients, and you’ll see firsthand what kind of benefits and advantages are possible for your business.
For more information about SOP Culture, and Raj’s other Continuum best practices, get in touch with Brainlink right away at (347) 460-2238 or raj@brainlink.com.