What Qualities Should You Look for in a Managed Services Provider?
AVI-SPL
User experience is the key to a successful meeting space investment. It is only through managing the user experience that today’s meeting rooms, both physical and virtual, will realize a return on their initial investment and ongoing operating expense.
If your collaboration service – regardless of which flavor you choose – is available always and everywhere, providing a consistent operating interface and a rich communication medium, it will be embraced by end users and highly utilized. Conversely, an unreliable, difficult, and limited meeting service will be bypassed in favor of other means of communication, often sacrificing productivity for convenience.
Delivering all the operational requirements of a meeting service is a challenge. These include typical technology management processes such as:
- Proactive Monitoring
- Lifecycle Management
- Incident and Change Management
- Asset Management
- Security and Patch Management
- Service Level reporting
Adding to the challenge, both physical and virtual meeting spaces require ongoing user adoption services and event support, sometimes known as concierge services. When evaluating the full set of requirements for a successful user experience within meeting spaces, organizations often look to service providers for a managed meeting service.
Many service providers can supply components of a managed meeting service, often with a focus on technology management. Typical managed services are designed to address basic monitoring and incident management, indicating their legacy of technology infrastructure support. A qualified meeting service provider should be able to demonstrate experience and success in three key areas:
Service Delivery Capability and Scope
When evaluating a service provider for meeting spaces, some significant questions need to be asked, including:
- How many managed service centers does the provider have, and where? Do they match my organization’s locations and hours?
- What is the range of certifications held by the managed service staff? Does the provider have any kind of continuing education plans or incentives?
- What are the limits to the managed service? How many additional charges could apply per year?
- Can it assist end users with meeting events? Do they add value with a variety of service capabilities?
Look for a service provider with multiple service centers, able to provide services around the world, at any time of day. Their engineers should hold a diverse set of manufacturer certifications, to avoid technology lock-in. Meeting support is time-critical, so service providers must be able to provide a direct line of support to end users as well as to IT departments.
Ability to Improve the User Experience
Your service provider should be able to provide advice and actions to monitor and improve the meeting experience.
- Their plan to measure the meeting experience of end users
- Their experience in improving a meeting service
- The metrics for success. Review examples of regular reporting done for other customers and test their knowledge of how they added value to the service improvement process.
Successfully Raising Meeting Technology Adoption and Utilization
If a service provider focuses exclusively on service availability and response/repair time metrics, they are missing a key value driver for organizations today – the adoption and utilization of meeting technology. Service providers must be able to demonstrate their ability to help users adapt new meeting technologies, through training as well as ongoing support.
Tracking the utilization of meeting technology is only a beginning. A service provider should be able to demonstrate their track record for providing onboarding services for their customer’s new employees. Monitoring usage and reaching out to users who are not utilizing the technology can help identify dissatisfied users or licenses that can be reclaimed for deployment elsewhere.
A service provider should also be able to show flexibility and creativity in this area. Recently, AVI-SPL assisted a variety of clients in quickly moving to entirely work-from-home solutions. For one such client, we were able to rapidly shift end users to a new meeting platform that supports their work-from-home efforts, conducting over 4,500 end user support sessions in the first four weeks of pandemic response, including concierge support for dozens of VIP calls during that timeframe. By deploying end user support documentation links and conducting new user outreach sessions, AVI-SPL enabled the customer to increase their virtual meeting space utilization while reducing the number of support requests over the subsequent weeks – two key measures of a successful user experience management program.
Want to experience a better user experience through managed services? Contact us today.
Today’s post comes from Mike Bakanas, service account manager for the northeastern region. With a strong track record of experience providing technical services to a variety of organizations, Mike designs service solutions that unlock business value.
