Are you an MSP that struggles with customers who just flat out refuse to use your portal to submit tickets, or they’re calling or texting your techs personally instead of using your process for submitting a ticket in this video?
I’m going to show you exactly how to solve that finally and forever.
Hey, this is Robin Robins, founder of technologymarketingtoolkit.com, and one of the questions that come up in our portal all the time is, “What do you do when a customer just flat out refuse to use your portal to submit tickets or they’re calling your personal cell phone or they just in general are refusing to follow your protocol for delivering technical support?”
When this question comes up on a portal, a lot of people have a lot of different advice on how to resolve this issue, anything from, charge them a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar penalty every time they do it, (which I don’t think is a great idea) to giving them a one-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gift certificate when they do use the portal, which is another thing that can get really expensive fast.
Figure Out How To Remove Irritants
If you find that your customers are annoyed with some aspect of doing business with you, like logging into a portal in order to submit a ticket, you might want to figure out a way where you can remove that irritant.
A long time ago, one of my mentors, Dr. Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, told me that you never want to choose your convenience over the customer. He told a story about when he started High Point University when he started as president.
Walking around the campus, he noticed that there was a path that students were walking between one building and the library, and it was wearing out the grass in between the two buildings and it looked awful.
As he was doing the tour with somebody who was a manager of the facilities there, he said, you know, Dr. Qubein, if there are any ideas, you have to keep people off this grass. Let us know, because we’ve tried signs, we’ve put threats, and we even put yellow tape up.
“Nothing seems to stop people. They just constantly want to walk from this path. What do you suggest we do?”
And he said, “I suggest we tear down the tree because there was a tree and they were walking around to get to the library, tear down the tree and pave it because our students have already shown us the way that they want to walk.”
This is a little bit of a tough question because you do want clients to follow protocol because if they don’t, that’s when you can miss a service ticket. Something could get lost in the shuffle. Like with my clients, I tell them, please do not email me questions because I don’t do email support.
If they want answers to questions, they can book a call with me, but I don’t respond to emails.
#1: A CLEAR Onboarding Process
When you’ve onboarded a customer, make sure you’re really clear that this is how you submit tickets, and this is why you got to do it this way. And so, it doesn’t get overlooked. It doesn’t get lost, and you don’t get aggravated with us. OK, so that’s number one.
#2: REINFORCE The Process
As you work with a client ongoing, if they fail to follow the protocol, then you’ve got to remind them, hey, I appreciate you calling. We’re here to help, but you’ve got to follow the protocol. So, I just think you have to keep reinforcing it, set the expectation from the beginning and then reinforce it and remind them. And it may even be where you have to ignore some of the requests that come into the wrong way again, to reinforce that.
That’s not the way that you can get technical support from us.
#3: Find An Easier Way
The bigger issue here is to find a way that clients can communicate with you the way that they want to communicate.
For example, if I have a technical support issue where my internet’s not working or my computer is down, I can’t log in to a portal to provide a ticket. So, they might prefer to send an email. They might prefer to make a phone call into a helpdesk.
And I would encourage you to figure out a way to make that happen again on our member queue, which I’m currently looking at right now, where this question came up, I’m hearing people saying, look, we don’t use the PSA portal. All tickets are open by phone or email because that’s the way customers want to communicate with us.
So, I would encourage you to figure out a way to make it easier for the customer to call, email, or even submit a technical support ticket.
So, if you like this tip, give me a like, give the video a thumbs up subscribe if you want to learn more strategies for having a more profitable, more successful managed services business. Thanks.
