Windows 7 support is ending, what are you doing about it?

January 14, 2020 is the last day of support for Windows 7 from Microsoft. It’s almost a year away, so why is that important? Well, upgrading a large environment of laptops and workstations isn’t exactly easy and as an MSP you’ll want to start thinking about your strategy in dealing with this change early.

Microsoft has your back

One of the first steps should be socializing this event with clients. Let them know about this deadline and its implications. In this case, Microsoft is helping you with creating awareness. KB4493132, a recent patch to Windows 7 release will create a notification window on Windows 7 machines letting them know about the end of support. These notices will start to appear mid-April, so be prepared for client questions about these pop-ups.

Help clients plan for change

It’s your responsibility as a technology partner to make sure the clients are aware of what this loss of support will mean. It means that Windows 7 will no longer receive security updates after January 14, 2020. This is a big deal for two reasons. On average 40% of deployed workstations are still running Windows 7. Given that security updates play a critical roll in protecting your client environments from cyber attacks, it’s important to have a plan to upgrade all Window 7 machines soon.

Budget

After you’ve created awareness about the need for this change you need to discuss budgeting with your clients. If you’re not doing budgeting as a part of your Technology Business Review (TBR) meetings, this is a great opportunity to start. Schedule meetings with your client to chat about their assets, how many Windows 7 machines they have, a high-level budget to replace the hardware, and a project to do the work. Clients often don’t have tens of thousands of dollars laying around for these types of events, unless you’ve been doing active budget planning with them already. This is why talking to them early about the need for this upgrade in the future is important. Work with them and allow them to budget for the coming project. They will appreciate your proactive involvement and you’ll appreciate their willingness to move forward with the project in a predictable and coordinated approach. The additional project revenue doesn’t hurt either right?

Hardware Scoping

The hardware and resource requirements are not dramatically different, for Windows 10, but you should consider all machines that are off warranty (older than 3-4 years), as ideal candidates for an upgrade. Do a hardware asset inventory, determine the warranty status of all the desktops and laptops.

If you haven’t felt the pinch already there is a CPU shortage in the industry right now, so be cautious as you are scoping hardware. Considering AMD CPUs or using pre-built SKUs from the distributor to ensure the units you quote/scope are going to be available.

Software Scoping

You may have clients that run a custom line of business (LOB) software package. This stuff is notorious for causing upgrade issues. In fact, you probably have a handful of XP machines still deployed at a couple of client sites for this same reason. ;)

As a part of the client planning take the opportunity to discuss these software packages, ensure they are supported on Windows 10 and look for modern replacements if it’s practical to do so.

Next Steps

1. Collect a client asset inventory.

2. Determine where there are high numbers of Windows 7 assets deployed.

3. Call the business decision makers at those clients. Ask for 30 minutes of their time to discuss their IT hardware strategy.

4. Follow up with an email suggesting 3 times to meet.

5. Book the meeting and deliver a compelling proposal for them to approve budget for the upgrade project in next 6 months.

Get out there and get those upgrades moving!

Why personality tests are useless

One of my favourite expressions is “Know thyself.” I’ve always been a fairly introspective person. I’ve been fascinated with my own psychology as well as understanding why others behaved the way they do. When I moved into management roles, this curiosity served me well. In any type of leadership role, it’s important to understand why people behave the way that they do, what motivates them, and how best to communicate with them.
So how do you know these things about people? One way is to ask, but you will find that people are terrible at accurately verbalizing these types of details about themselves. 
If you work with the person for long enough you may start to observe some patterns, but this can be a slow and unreliable approach.

Personality testing has become popular, but unfortunately, they are unreliable. Have you ever taken a Myers-Briggs test? They can be fun, but should not be used for business purposes. The test is based on largely debunked theories from Carl Jung in the 20s. For the gory details, you can read this article. For the TL;DR crowd here is an excerpt. 

“ Several analyses have shown the test is totally ineffective at predicting people's success in various jobs, and that about half of the people who take it twice get different results each time.”
“This isn't a test designed to accurately categorize people, but rather a test designed to make them feel happy after taking it. This is one of the reasons it's persisted for so many years in the corporate world after being disregarded by psychologists.”

DISC behavioural profiling is different than the standard battery of personality tests. Personality is subjective and can be highly influenced by your state of mind, environment, and other external factors. While Myers-Briggs results will vary from week to week, DISC tends to remain static for 3-5 years. DISC, unlike Myer-Briggs, IS based in science. The results are shockingly accurate and reliable. The most common feedback I get from having people do a profile is, “Spooky,” or “Bang-on.” 
Do you use any personality or behavioural profiling in your hiring or staff management process? If you’d like to profile your team and find out what makes them tick, please get in touch and we can review.

What to do when a client's IT is a total mess

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “If you think a professional is expensive, wait till you hire an amateur.” The technology field is a perfect example of this. We’ve all had those clients that were managed by a semi-technically literate person in the office. You’ve probably inherited a client from another MSP in your area and found it was barely managed at all by the previous provider.
The fact that most people don’t understand technology is a blessing and a curse. If more people were capable of supporting their own IT needs, there wouldn’t be as much work for us. The downside is that people are often misled or simply unable to tell if their IT support provider is doing the work that is expected of them.

Here is a familiar scenario.
Client prospect company is a small accounting office with 14 staff. They have the youngest guy in the office do tech support for the rest of the company and they also have an “MSP” that they call when they need. They are looking for a new support provider because the current provider sometimes takes a day or two to get around to helping them. The prospect has grown tired of waiting and needs a more mature level of support.

STEP 1: Review environment

You should assess the environment. This can be as simple as a walkthrough of the office. An experienced senior tech should have a good sense of the situation simply by looking at the physical environment. Is the network rack a rat nest of wires? Is the server a white-box with the side panel taken off cause the closet they use as a server room is overheating the equipment?
This review of the environment can give you a great sense of what the current status is and how much risk the client would bring to your company as a supported client.

STEP 2: Gauge client’s willingness to invest

If the client environment is a hot mess, many people would assume it’s because the prospect is cheap and refused to pay for the appropriate equipment and support levels. Sure, this is often the case, but you shouldn’t jump to that conclusion without confirming with the prospect. 
Meet with the client in person to discuss the results of your findings and what you would propose to remedy the situation. Lay out a plan of projects that are high impact and would remove the major points of risk. They may not agree to everything because they likely haven’t been budgeting for IT spending. However, they should express a desire to make the investment in fixing major issues. They should have a reliable server, hopefully with warranty support. They should have an image based backup in place. They should have cloud-based email services like O365 or G-suite.

STEP 3: Go or no-go

If you want to build a business that doesn’t cause you to lose sleep or feel like you’re constantly pushing a boulder up a hill, you need to be selective about the clients you take on. When you’re first getting started the temptation to take on any client is strong, but this approach can create a lot of headaches for you and your staff. If the prospect is a mess and resists spending to correct the major issues, walk away! If they spend the majority of the time talking about the price of service and projects. They are not going to be a good client.
If they see the value of the changes and appreciate you bringing them to light, get them to commit to making the major correction within the first 2-3 months of the relationship. Straight away would be better, but may not be practical based on their cash flow. 

“All revenue is not created equal”

All revenue is not created equal. Don’t chase clients that are simply looking for the lowest price.
Just because a prospect environment is a disaster doesn’t mean they know that. Act in their best interest, be honest about the situation. Never blame the previous provider, remain focused on the future. Help them understand that you will provide a higher level of service and that lowering their risk will avoid costly issues in the future like downtime, data-loss, and crypto events.

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How Measuring Customer Satisfaction Impacts Your Business

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is an important metric to measure how your customers feel about your service. If you aren’t measuring CSAT, you can never really be sure how your customers feel about you. This gap in data can be blissful ignorance to a raging fire that will lead to customer churn, or you are unaware of the raving fans you’ve built with your service. Either way it’s important to know this truth.

If you’re clients are happy you can use Simplesat’s social proof promotion tool to advertise the love you are getting from your clients.

Publish feedback right to your website

Also, it’s important to maintain that level of service and know when you’re slipping so you have the chance to make a few saves and win back the confidence of your customers.

Real-time specific feedback

If there is a raging fire of disappointment in your service you’re better off knowing that early, so you can understand the specific points of contention. If someone says, “your service sucks.” This isn’t really helpful. Especially if they tell you this as justification for why they are canceling your service! Feedback like:

• “It took too long for someone to get back to me.”
• “The issue wasn’t fixed and you closed the ticket.”
• “Fred was not very friendly and didn’t answer my question.”

Each of these sting in different ways, but they are also breadcrumbs that lead you to solve issues in your service. Sometimes it’s a process issue, a communication issue, or a people issue. The specific feedback creates the opportunity for you to acknowledge the individual complaint and take corrective steps to reduce the likelihood of the issue recurring.

Dealing with a negative survey score

Ultimately an upset customer wants to be acknowledged. If someone logs a complaint in your CSAT system, like Simplesat, the system will generate a notice.

Email notification of a negative survey in Simplesat

Someone can then call that person and apologize for the service issue, hear them out, make any available remediation on the spot and acknowledge that you take their feedback seriously and will do better in the future.

Keep the feedback flywheel spinning

If people recognize that you take their feedback seriously and you provide proof of action through future behavior it will build their trust in you as a service provider. It will also encourages them to provide additional feedback. Both positive and negative. In many cases, I have found that the most vocal detractors can be won over to be your most vocal advocates. They simply need to be acknowledged and supported.

Real life example of CSAT rollout

Here is a real example of feedback from Theresa Kent of Providence Consulting, who implemented Simplesat. She was blown away by the power of the real-time data that Simplesat provided her and her team.

“We are getting back some customer satisfaction data! This data is BEYOND valuable as it is real-time, real scenario feedback. The amount of responses we have received has surpassed our initial expectations. This is great because this tells us that our clients truly want to let Providence know how we are doing.
As you can see, this is where we are after just a few short weeks. What good looks like to Providenceis having a satisfaction rate of >90%. We are there, but barely. It only took 1 neutral and 1 negative rating to have us drop almost 10%. Based on the comments that have come with the positive ratings though, I know this will shoot right back up! Keep up the amazing work—it shows and the proof really is in the pudding.”

Theresa Kent | Customer Success Manager
Providence Consulting

Managed Services Metrics Service Managers Should Focus On

Your managed services helpdesk team is very busy. There are several service desk metrics that can help measure your performance. Here are some metrics that a service manager should be focusing on.

Simple Service Desk Metrics

Open vs Close

The easiest service desk metrics to focus on is the number of tickets open versus number of tickets closed. If there are 200 support tickets opened in a day you should be closing at least 200 tickets a day. This is a simple measure of your closure rate. If you aren’t closing more tickets than you’re closing, you will end up with a backlog. A backlog of tickets will lead to longer resolution time on tickets which will lead to unhappy clients and stressed out support staff.

Mature Service Desk Metrics

Service Level Agreements (SLA)

Once your service desk reaches a certain level of maturity and is able to close more tickets than are opened in a day, the team can move on to more advanced service metrics. Service level agreements (SLA) ensure that when a support ticket is opened, it is acknowledged, started, and resolved in a set period of time. An SLA will ensure that not only is the simple volume of tickets being managed, but the priority of the tickets is being managed as well. Since not all tickets carry the same urgency, it’s important to be able to juggle a little and close the high priority requests fast. I did a very detailed blog post previously about managing SLAs [here].

Performance Management (Advanced metrics)

Tickets Per Tech

Once the team metrics are in place, you can start to focus on individual contribution. How many tickets should the support techs be closing? This can vary a lot from person to person, but having an expectation of output from each team member can be invaluable. Tier 1 support staff, in general, should be able to close 10-20 tickets a day. Tier 2 slightly lower at 5-10 and Tier 3 maybe 5 a day. Whatever the number is, just simply having an agreement between the team member and the service manager is important. This allows for a measure of the output from each team member against a target. If there is a slip in actual output, the manager can work with the staff member to determine why. It can also allow the manager to increase the team performance by setting higher output targets with the team.

Client Satisfaction (CSAT)

One of the key risks to increasing a helpdesk staff members output is it can often lead to low-quality closes. In order to hit a certain number, the helpdesk staff will simply close tickets without checking with the user to ensure they are satisfied with the resolution. When you’re smaller you can review each ticket to ensure the staff is following the support policy and contacting the user to make sure they are satisfied, but this approach doesn’t scale well. Using customer satisfaction (CSAT) as a team metric as well as an individual metric is a great way to protect the clients from quick-closes. Having CSAT scoring available to measure individual technicians metric is really useful as well. If you’re using Connectwise or Autotask surveys you’re likely not getting the amount of feedback that makes this a useful metric. Instead, use SimpleSat. SimpleSat makes it crazy simple for the client to give you quick feedback on every ticket that gets worked on. Plus the data is collected in a beautiful dashboard for easy review or team and individual staff members.

Simplesat Connectwise Survey Dashboard

So if you’re just getting started with MSP helpdesk metrics or you’re already a mature operator, make sure you are using CSAT to measure and manage your customers feedback about the quality of the service your team is delivering. Simplesat has a free 30-day trial to get you started and if you tell them that you heard about Simplesat from Evolved, they will give you 15% the posted website price.

Header image thanks to Infocash on Flickr.

Getting your techs to enter time

I’ve worked in IT for 20+ years. I’ve worked at large enterprise systems integrators, small IT support companies, and run my own consulting group. I’ve run teams of 5 and teams of 50. No matter the place, no matter who I talk to in the industry, one of the most common issues people struggle with is time management and timesheet entry.

What strategies have people found successful in getting people to enter their time be accountable to this responsibility? Also, how do you manage your workload so that you don’t feel overwhelmed?

Here are a few I've found successful.

1. Explain why it’s necessary

It’s amazing how much a little bit of education can change someone’s feeling about having to do something. When onboarding someone, explain to them, “We need you to enter your time. Without your time entry, we can’t create invoices for the clients, which means we don’t get paid. So it’s pretty important. This is why I’ll be persistent about you getting your time entered.” Even if you don’t need the time entry for invoices, just substitute the WHY on the time entry, explain how it fits in the company process. If people realize it’s not time entry for time entries sake they may put up less of a fight.

2. Make it easy

The more cumbersome the time entry is, the less likely people will be compliant with the process. This kind of true of anything, but if time entry is important to your business, you need to spend the time to remove the fat/overhead from the process.

3. Prioritization

One of the major reasons people get overwhelmed is a lack of focus. There is only one thing you can do at a time. (check the research multitasking doesn’t work) Focusing on what is important. Making small gains feeds momentum. Anytime someone showed up to my office overwhelmed I loved working with them to write out on the whiteboard all the things they felt they needed to do. We would discuss urgency and importance of each. Stack rank the top three things and send them on their way. “Focus on these three first. If you need more help come back and see me after.” Usually, they just needed perspective to break out of the overwhelmed state. They rarely came back soon for help with the next three things.

4. Train them

What makes humans amazing is our ability to contemplate and influence the future. We are terrible at influencing the past, but we sure do spend a lot of time on the past. Switch your thinking and focus on the future. Train yourself and your staff on how you want things to be done in the future, then give them feedback to ensure they follow their training. Forget about what people have or have not done. Focus on what you want them to do. Train them, support them, and coach them.

I’m passionate about helping MSP techs gets more done with less stress and a sense of greater control, so I built the MSP Productivity Accelerator Course. It teaches you techniques of the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology and how to manage your workload in the Connectwise. I did this type of training in person a lot and people always found it helpful. If you want yourself and your team to be better at managing your time and staying on top of the work in your PSA check it out.

How Customer Surveys Create Better Customer Service

How do you know you’re providing excellent service? You can’t just go by your gut here. The quality of your customer service is defined by what your customers say about your service. So how do you get that feedback from your customers? How do you measure your customer satisfaction (CSAT)?

Do your customers like you?

Why should you care about customer satisfaction?

New business from word of mouth is the cheapest and most rewarding marketing you can do. Satisfied customers are the best way to reduce attrition. As competition increases, costs decline, and technology gets more standardized, the best way to truly differentiate yourself from the noise is through remarkable customer service. That’s how you create, what Seth Godin calls, your purple cow. 

Like most things in business, you can’t improve something if you don’t measure it. Your customer experience is no different.

“What gets measured gets managed.” - Peter Drucker

The lack of focus on customer experience from most MSPs in the industry creates a huge opportunity to differentiate yourself from your competition.

"As a result of this pressure to improve the customer experience, many MSPs are devoting more resources to IT/technology roles than sales and marketing. Surprisingly, a full half of those surveyed say they don’t prioritize the customer experience when evaluating their managed-service offerings, and one-quarter don’t measure customer satisfaction at all…. How can you retain customers if you don’t even care enough to see if they’re happy with the way you’re servicing them?"

-- Channel Futures article "New ConnectWise Research Shows MSPs Are Underwater"

The Negative

According to “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner, businesses only hear from 4% of its dissatisfied customers. So if you hear a lot of negative feedback, it’s probably much worse than you realize, but even if you don’t hear negative feedback, you’re missing a ton of feedback points. This fact is even more relevant when you consider 95% of people who have a negative service experience will share that experience with peers. 

Managing negative feedback on your service serves a critical function in protecting your brand reputation and gives you an opportunity to correct any negative points of feedback.

The Positive

On the flip side of customer service feedback, according to RightNow, 86% of people are willing to pay up to 25% more for a service if they have a positive view of the service. A Bain & Company study suggests that just a 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 95% increase in profits. This makes sense when you consider the high client acquisition costs of new clients vs. increasing the lifetime value of a current customer.

Most businesses use surveys to collect feedback from their customers. In the MSP industry companies often use the Connectwise client surveys or Autotask customer surveys. This is a decent first step since some feedback is better than none, but what people find is the number of people that actually complete a customer survey is frustratingly low. Email surveys can give you a 5% completion rate on average. Which simply does not give you enough to work off of? 1-2 surveys a week, will not give you the data you need to find issues, make changes and wow your customers.

Simple is better

What if a simple change to your survey process would allow you to get over 50% survey completion? 

A typical customer satisfaction survey is a link that opens a webpage and asks you to complete a multiple choice survey. These are often multiple pages as well. Even if the customer is inclined to click on the link in the first place, over half of those people will bail out before completing the survey. Anything more than one click is asking too much of people.

Using a one-click survey like this one from SimpleSat dramatically increases the likelihood of the customer giving you feedback. 

Simple Customer Satisfaction Rating

They don’t need to go anywhere or fill out any forms. They simply click on one of three graphics that visually describe their satisfaction with your company. 

This simplicity of interaction reduces the friction between the client giving you feedback by not requiring a lot of time or effort on their part. You don’t need a paragraph of text, you don’t need to score their feedback across 6 different questions. You only need to know the percentage of people that are happy versus unhappy with the service.

Recovery

There is a hidden opportunity in having more negative feedback. After all, you can’t fix a problem you didn’t know existed. SimpleSat has a beautiful dashboard that empowers you to view feedback, customer details, a team member leaderboard and overall satisfaction stats.

This helps you keep the pulse of how people perceive your service. If you get negative (or neutral) feedback, create a workflow that alerts the service manager right away. Reach out to the user and hear them out. Make all efforts to resolve their complaint. People are trained not hear back from the companies they work with, so when you respond quickly you can win their confidence.

Real-time website testimonials

Publish customer feedback to your website with one click

After you set up a good process to take care of negative and neutral feedback, you should make sure you’re taking full advantage of all the positive comments you’ll be receiving. 

SimpleSat makes it easy to publish these comments directly on your website with the click of a button. No more out-of-date website testimonials!

Fresh Testimonials right to your website

Customer Experience as a superpower

It is not likely a client would refer you to a peer in their industry because you have great technology. In many cases, the people running the businesses you support do not care about the technology. The hired you, so they Don’t have to care about technology. What they DO care about is if they get value for the service you provide and if their staff complain about the service you provide. The quality of the customer service you deliver and the client satisfaction with that service is the only true differentiator you have in the IT support industry. Make customer service your business superpower. Measure it, improve it, and win your clients love in the process. 

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For more info on the simplest customer satisfaction survey system in the industry check out SimpleSat and sign up for a free trial today.

5 Key Ingredients To A Successful Team

Google is a massive company and has had tremendous success. So what's the secret to growing a company like Google? The people operations team (HR) set off on a two-year quest to research what made successful teams. They guessed it would be something to do with a supportive team composition with complimentary skillsets and experience. What they found instead was something much simpler than they expected.

Google loves data and in order to research what makes a successful team, they spent two years interviewing 200+ Google staff members from all sorts of different teams. Development, sales, finance, marketing, everyone they could get their hands on. They cataloged the attributes of the teams and compared them against various performance metrics. These were the top 5 attributes to the teams that had the highest performance and most engaged team members.

1. Psychological safety: Confidence to speak and act without feeling insecure or being embarrassed.
2. Dependability: Individuals can count on each other to deliver high-quality work on time.
3. Structure & clarity: Team has clear goals and plans to execute.
4. Meaning of work: Feeling their work has personal meaning to them.
5. Impact of work: Feeling their work makes a contribution.

5 keys to team performance according to Google Re:Work

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Psychological safety

One of my all-time favorite business books, is Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. One of the central themes of the book is how teams are an extension of tribal culture and there is a deep-rooted need for safety in groups. This is demonstrated really well by close bonds formed between military units and first responders. Most of us are lucky, in that if our team members fail us we won't die. Military and first responders lives often depend on the person standing next to them. In the book, Sinek speaks to how a team with a low level of trust will often turn on each as they sense a threat from each other. A strong team will bond together and recognize the external threat. Everyone can recognize the truth in this. We've all been a part of teams that were bogged down in infighting and people sniping at each other. The amount of distraction and negativity this creates is a huge boat anchor on productivity and morale. Naturally, teams that don't trust each other perform poorly compared to teams with high trust.

Dependability

Dependability feels like an extension of trust to me. If team members feel that their peers will deliver their work on time, it has a tangible impact on trust. It also serves as peer motivation for the rest of the team to also deliver high-quality work on time. Of course, the inverse is true as well. When a team member doesn't deliver their work, the rest of the team gets frustrated and sometimes feels less inclined to do their work as well. This is why flagging and managing underperforming team members is critical. You can't let them spoil the work product of the rest of the team. Provided the team sees that a manager or even other peers are applying pressure to that person to correct their accountability, that can be enough to keep the team performance from suffering overall.

Structure & Clarity

This is one of the most commonly overlooked aspects of business planning. In most cases there is no strategic plan for the company. If something does exist it's often in the owners head. The effectiveness of leadership has a strong correlation to being able to communicate the goals of the organization. It's not enough to say, "We want to make lots of money and provide great service." I encourage businesses to write down strategic plans in a simple format that makes it easy to communicate. This is often done in the form of a one-page-plan. There are several ways to do this Gazelles, Traction, A3 (lean method). You don't need a 13 page report on your strategy. It will only make it more difficult to communicate. A simple one pager that outlines the goals of the organization is drastically easier to explain to someone else.

Once you have the clarity of the plan with target goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). It becomes easier to measure what is needed from staff. The clarity of the core responsibilities of the role make it much easier for management and staff to agree on what productive work look like. It shifts the conversation from, "You're not doing well at your job." Which is subjective and feels like a personal attack to, "You closed 4 tickets this week. Everyone else on your team hit 15. So what happened?" Don't fear measuring your staff performance. Provided your KPIs are fair, people will love the visibility. People that resist metrics are usually under performers. 

Meaning/Impact

I will roll these two together since I feel they are strongly related and probably the toughest ones to get in place. Unless you work for an organization that is saving whales or curing cancer. It can be tough to conceptualize the impact you have in your job. This is why is critical for leadership to help frame the impact of people's work. In a knowledge based job like technology it's tough for people to point to a job well done. Hopefully you have some metrics to measure your success, but it's not like you can point to a house or a bridge and say, "I built that."

Some simple things you can do are ensuring staff have a sense of direction in their career. As a part of their development they need to be thinking about their future. Do they want to grow in to a management position? Do they want to be the cloud or security expert in the group? Do they want to complete their CCNA or MCSE? Whatever their goals, the goals need to be kept alive by the team member and actively supported by management.

Celebrating success with the team is also important for a group sense of accomplishment. When you win a new client do you ring a gong in the office, or have everyone participate in a group cheer? When you complete a large project or new client on-boarding, do you order in a nice lunch (not just pizza) or a cake to mark the occasion? Keep your team success visible and celebrate at every opportunity. It will be really helpful to the teams morale and sense of accomplishment.

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If you'd like to learn a bit more abut creating psychological safety you can watch this TEDx talk from Amy Edmondson below.