Delivering World-Class Service in the Managed Service Provider (MSP) Industry: Why Culture Matters.

Hi, my name is Yan Ness and I am the CEO of Online Tech.

In my experience and talking with other companies, I have found that many employees complain about service levels from their internal IT department. I believe the reason for this is simply that delivering world-class data center services is really difficult, even for your own internal IT department. I have found that our culture is a critical tool for successfully delivering world-class managed data center services.

Three components of our culture really stand out.

The first is our win-win or no deal approach, which is a stated corporate value on our website. One of our employees said it best in this blog post where he describes how win-win or no deal is critical to focusing on earning our clients love each and every day. Without it our recurring business model would have an inherent fault – forced attrition. In fact, he posits that it’s basically a required value for anyone providing managed data center services.

A second component of our culture that enhances our ability to deliver world-class managed services is communication. For example, every day we have an all-hands 5 minute conference call. At the call the staff (not management) announces critical client facing metrics that track our sales and services success with clients. Any client issue not resolved since the last huddle is assigned to an officer of the company for resolution.

The third component of our culture is transparency. We use transparency to assure that issues (and successes) are quickly surfaced and cleared. To make sure we celebrate successes we call out and count any Raves which are unsolicited client commendations. And so that we are sure to learn from our mistakes, we call out and count Razes, which are unsolicited client complaints. And most powerful is that when something goes wrong, or if we make a mistake, we quickly own up to the issue and make sure our answers and explanations are as transparent as possible.

We are not perfect but we work harder than anyone else. So the more transparent we are, the more our hard work is brought to the surface.

And that’s Win-Win.