We are the #1 IT Support and Services Company in Fresno says every IT company in Fresno. Even the most optimistic buyer finds flaws with this statement since it is an impossibility that every single service provider in Fresno is number 1. If every service provider in Fresno can’t be #1 then we might ask if it possible for a service provider prove that they are in fact #1?” For fun we create a list of some of the ways a service provider could prove it is #1 in IT support in Fresno.
1.) Revenue Growth could be a great way to prove you are #1, after all the stock market tends to value companies with consistent revenue growth. Revenue growth could also be coming from happy customers making referrals which certainly proves superiority. On the flip side, it could just mean a larger sales team or more effective sales team rather than anything customers value. Accordingly revenue growth alone shouldn’t prove 1 service provider is better than another.
2.) Client Satisfaction seems like the next logical place to look since higher satisfaction might mean a given company should be ranked higher than another. However, in thinking about it at a deeper level it not obvious what aspect of the IT Services should or can be measured with client satisfaction? In particular within IT Services there are different functions such as; help desk services, projects, network operations and IT strategy to name a few. Not all of these services are best measured with “customer satisfaction.” Additionally, there are also many stakeholders in an organization such as ; end users, financial decision maker, operations people, etc. Each of these stakeholders have different needs from IT and customer satisfaction typically focus on the end users perspective of the help desk and not the value the rest of the IT services deliver nor the other stakeholders require.
3.) Customer Attrition is another way to look at performance and it would be true that a company that is losing MATERIALLY more customers than another company might be a lesser organization. However the key word is materially more loss as it turns out that some customer loss is unavoidable, i.e. going out of business, reducing costs, acquired, downsizing, one large customer, etc. This means we can’t really put on organization higher than another if the customer attrition is in a normal range since the difference would most likely be explained by circumstantial events rather than being better than another company.
4.) The length of time that the average customer is/has been a customer is something else that seems relevant to a discussion involving ranking a service provider. It can give an indication of customers perceived price/value or the service providers consistency and at the very least the trustworthiness of the organization. In other words a service provider with longer term customers(avg say 7 years) could be superior to one that has short term relationships(leave after 3 years). However, often times this number has other factors that contribute to it such as how selective the Fresno Service Provider is at taking on new customers, how many new customers they are going after, the type of businesses the service provider works with. In fact if a Fresno Service provider has long term customers but isn’t growing and has too many long term(read stale) employees then often times it is a sign they aren’t evolving their business which is a death sentence in the tech space.
5.) A factor that isn’t as obvious part of a discussion but worth throwing into the discussion is the service providers ability to keep consistency as they add new customers. In other words, can the operators of the business scale the business and keep customers? If not then they even if they were number #1 before they won’t be for much longer. This is something that is hard to quantify but clearly helps identify an advantage in operations between a Fresno Service Provider that won’t be successful at satisfying NEW clients vs one that will.
Based on the basic analysis above you can see why the proving that any one Fresno IT Support company is #1 is an academic exerciser rather than something that can be proven false…and for people that remember Boolean logic then since saying you are the #1 Fresno IT Service Provider can’t be proven false then MY (OUR) logical conclusion is that CIO Solutions is the number 1 Managed Service Provider in Fresno.What does all this mean to a prospective buyer of IT Services? It means that we do have a formula that looks across a broad range of capabilities to ensure the Service Provider is at least A #1 and not a dud.
The formula is:
- Ensure the organization is growing at the same rate of the market in general.
- Make sure they can prove a high level of customer satisfaction in a manner than aligns with your needs which includes subsets of IT services and multiple stakeholders in the organization
- Ask about Customer Attrition and Average Age of Customers looking for responses that make you confident they don’t bleed customers and generally keep long term relationships. You want the service provider to value relationships and demonstrate they are in it for the long game since switching service providers can disrupt business.
- Make sure they convince you they can grow the business when they bring on new customers without hurting your service. You don’t want to be the customer that signs on only to have service degrade when they sign the next customer on.