Improving Transparency of Work With CloudRadial

One of the main purposes of CloudRadial is to increase transparency between the MSP and the client.

Before the existence of an integrated account management platform, many MSPs had to rely on a mixture of tool reporting and uncoordinated account management strategies to get their value across – in essence, relying on break-fix account management. 

While meetings with clients should consist of business-level discussions as vCIO partners, many times limiting tools and lack of processes leave the MSP to discuss technicalities that neither interest nor help the client understand what services they're receiving, and what ultimate goal they're working towards.

The result?

Confused clients that don't get what they're paying for that could leave for someone cheaper at any moment.

But with CloudRadial, you've got the tools and the strategy at your disposal to change the game. With it, you should aim to achieve three main things:

• Improved client visibility with information and roadmaps available to the client 24/7/365
• Standardized and legible reporting, thanks to select fields and uniform data gathering from our agent
• Increased collaboration between MSP and client with the account planner

Improving Client Visibility

Most services don’t have you waiting for a specific scheduled time to review information about what you pay for. Think about something like your electric company.

Whenever you want to review usage data or news that might affect you, you generally have a portal that you can access that gives you relevant information – whenever you want it. Additionally, you always physically see what you're paying for.

The bill gets paid, the light stay on... simple enough.

You don't care about problems with the transformer or if the kilowatt-hours dipped one day. You just want to know you're getting your power consistently, and for a good price.

Now, let's apply the same concept to IT solutions. 

Clients pay their bills, but they don't get to see the same physical effect like electricity. They know that they're paying for backup, or security, or help desk support... but what does that really look like for them?

Currently, most MSPs solve this visibility challenge with the QBR to brain-dump their technical information onto them to prove value (with additional sales efforts to boot). That includes sending them any and all reports, dashboards, alerts, and proprietary files that can help show them IT activity. Sometimes, it's done physically with stacks of paper. Other times, with a million emails.

The client gets a headache and they still don't know what's going on.

Giving them a portal that has 24/7/365 access to information that they care about puts the power back in their hands. If they want to see how their infrastructure is doing, they can. If they want to see the status of tickets in their organization, the info is there. If they want to check on their invoices, they can do that too.

All from one single portal. 

Suddenly, the confusion and lack of visibility that you get from disparate tools and planned meetings is eliminated with a real single pane of glass view of anything they need. And once they've had access to that kind of transparency, any other kind will seem laughable.

For them, the benefits are obvious. For you, that also means better accountability and tracking so that you can improve the client experience as a whole.

Standardized and Legible Reporting 

Every MSP, from the 1-man shop to the multi-region enterprise, struggles with scaling their account management processes.

And that’s perfectly normal – it’s hard to present different IT solutions across different service packages with different tools and different account managers in a simple, effective way.

And that's one of the reasons why CloudRadial runs it's own agent. 

Because the CloudRadial agent pulls only specific fields, it can keep things consistent and scalable. If necessary, additional tools and reports can add to the conversation via the report archive feature.

And, because we’re looking for business-minded data (like encryption, password policies, slow machines, warranty information, etc), we’re keeping the conversation open and understandable to those that don’t share our technical prowess.

Setting the standard for your business using the built-in compliance policies allows you to set benchmarks for your services and standards and showcase, with a score, exactly what you’re looking for within an IT infrastructure. Every account manager can now reliably run reports with a click of a button that pulls a standardized report across the board – easy to run, and ultra scalable.

Want more info on CloudRadial compliance policies? Check out this video to learn how they work.

That’s particularly good for two reasons.

First, it helps you standardize what is and isn’t acceptable to your business.

50% encryption across the board may be fine for certain PCs in a small business, but you need closer to 99% for enterprises. When the agent gathers this information for you, it’ll display it within reports at all times – so the client can see exactly what they need to work on.

Second, it gives the client marks of progress.

Whenever you set your benchmark, you make IT a tangible thing. It’s not something that runs mysteriously in the background – it’s something that has a score, a color, and a dashboard. Complacency hurts scores and business, and the reports will reflect that. Human beings are naturally attracted to things they can see and measures, and red marks on reports will stick out.

Once you combine the two factors together, you get a tangible plan that you can use to offer services to improve scores and grow business. And, because you’ve got it standardized across the board, you can also use it as a pre-sales tool just as effectively.

Benchmarking potential prospects will show them, in real-time, where they need to improve and how you can help them lower risk and run their business better. Ultimately, that gets you out of the technical discussion and turns you into a true vCIO.

You’re focused on business, not individual technical matters.

Increasing Collaboration

Many MSPs describe their customer relationships as business partnerships. And, as with any partnership, there should be back and forth communication.

But is there? Not always.

There’s little more frustrating than having someone just run things for you without telling you why decisions need to happen or to dive deep into technicalities that you don’t understand.

With CloudRadial, you have a mix of built-in features to help your customers understand you – while also giving feedback of their own. Specifically, the account planner feature in CloudRadial positions you to build a roadmap that showcases your services in a concise, visually appealing, and business-focused that the client can understand. 

And there’s more – they can easily add planner items of their own so that they can discuss things too. Instead of you sitting down and explaining the plan, it becomes a discussion (rather than a lecture) of what’s happening with the business and how IT will help support those decisions.

Sometimes it might be a matter of cleaning up existing issues. Other times, you may need to complete one-off projects. The planner is built to give both the MSP and the client the flexibility to discuss matters in a visual, collaborative way so that no matter the discussion point, it’s always visible to both parties.

With the planner, you become the wise adviser that consults your client on measurable plan to achieve their business goals. Yes, you still dish out the technicalities when necessary – but you’re focused on the overall care and progress forward.

That’s a much better partnership with the critical addition of collaboration that puts you in a position to be a trusted expert rather than someone who simply completes individual services (which they can get anywhere, potentially for cheaper).

Improving Transparency with CloudRadial

When you combine visibility, reporting, and collaboration into a bundle, you should see a dramatic improvement in your client relationships.

With CloudRadial you get better conversations, happier clients, and a more scalable MSP as a whole.