Why It is Important to Send Clients Regular Reports

As a managed service provider, we take pride that we can elevate the business operations of our clients by giving them excellent IT solutions, and by taking care of their IT infrastructure.

We take their ill-managed, neglected, misconfigured, badly-setup and outdated network and system and bring them back to life, better than ever.

You would think that the work you have done speaks for itself; after all, the customer had gone through the worst IT experience before you came along.

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However, at the first sign of trouble, the customer will quickly lay blame at your feet. Suddenly, all the hard work you’ve done no longer matters.

People Tend to Focus on the Negative than the Positive

That is just the nature of things. People tend to dwell more on the negative side of things than looking at the positive side of things.

That goes for being a managed service provider. You will not hear a peep from your customer when everything is going smoothly. The moment, however, that their system and network go down, you will hear the dreaded words everyone in the service industry do not want to hear, which is “What the hell am I paying you for?”

It is Part of the Job

Of course, you cannot be upset to the customer. If you look at it from their perspective, they are indeed paying you to manage and maintain their IT infrastructure.

Yes, you did an excellent job at fixing all the issues from before you handled them as a client, and as a result, everything is smooth sailing on their part.

However, as with everything in the business world, you are only as good as your last result. And if the customer experience downtime due to network and system issues, then it is only natural that they look to you for a solution.

This is Where Regular Reporting Comes in

Even if everything is going smoothly, you should always send daily health check reports to the client. It will give your client the impression that the reason why they have high uptime is because you are there to keep their network and systems in tip-top shape.

These health check reports highlight all the systems that were checked and their current status when the report was sent.

One mistake that a lot of managed service providers do is that when there are minor bugs and issues that need to be fixed, they resolve it first. Once the issue is resolved, they do not include these on the reports anymore.

Their health check report says a clean bill of health.

That could be a mistake. While the intention of the managed service provider is to show that everything is always fine, the client may think that the provider is doing nothing. Now that everything is going smoothly, the provider is just sitting there collecting their check from the customer.

However, if you include the bugs and issues that you encountered and how you resolved them, the client will have an idea that you are also working hard to keep their networks and systems running. As a result, the customer has more appreciation for the job you are doing for them.

Reports for Executives vs Reports for IT Managers

Often, the point-of-contact with a company is not always the business owner. It could be the IT manager or anybody in the office in charge of the daily operations. They are the ones who usually receive regular health check reports. They are the one who tells the executives and the business owners if you are doing a good job or a lousy job.

However, business owners and other executives want to feel that they are not being bypassed. You cannot send them the daily health checks, though, because they would not care for it. They only want to know if they are getting their money’s worth from you as their managed service provider.

What you can do is send them regular executive reports monthly. It is a high-level overview of the issues you encountered, how you resolved them, the average system and network uptimes, and tickets filed and addressed by your team. You have to highlight the different metrics that measure your performance and show how you met and exceeded those. No need for the nitty-gritty details, those can be included in the daily reports.

It goes to show how important it is that daily health check reports are sent. It is a practice that is strictly implemented here at thinkIT Solutions. We want to be transparent about everything, including the negative things, to our customers.

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