Some Tips On Reacting To Our Customers Changing Needs
By: Claire Mullen
Tags: Customer Success, Managed Service Provider, Customer Advocacy, Digital Transformation

At Version 1, our customers share equal value with our people and the strength of our organisation. It is an approach that has been fundamental to our successes over the years, and that is demonstrated through our customer retention scores of 98%.

As we all know, the last two years has thrown challenges that we’ve felt at a personal level and in the workplace too. From being in a customer facing role, that has meant changing approach quickly to allow us to best support our customers. There are some real considerations we need to make in terms of how we engage with our customers.

The landscape of delivery has changed. As we adapt to remote, hybrid and onsite working traditional delivery models are gone. At the heart of it, our customers are people and they’re trying to react in their own lives to the challenges we’re facing.

Version 1 undertook a strategic initiative this year, Becoming Naturally Digital. This is a shift in our organisation transitioning from ‘acting and thinking’ digital to ‘thinking and designing’ digital, requiring us to review all ways of working, people practices and the technology we use. We can take what we have learned from this and share it with our customers. We aim to build relationships with our customers that is based on a Trusted Advisor ethos and having discussions outside of the traditional services is key to building that trust.

From a customer’s perspective, we need to react to the challenges they are facing with their organisations. Listening to your customer is key, sometimes what they are asking of us isn’t visible in the initial question and to translate this into an effective response means understanding why they are asking this of us.

What we are proposing to our customers. Anyone in a customer facing role knows that in February 2020, everything changed. Projects that were seen as critical were deprioritised and many organisations shifted to survival mode. For some organisations, impact was limited, but for others, it meant that they had to abandon their approach and revise their strategy. Version 1 are a Core Values driven organisation and one of our core values is Integrity. When we approach dealing with change in our customer’s needs, integrity is critical in proposing the right solutions for our customers.

With this in mind, we as a services organisation have a responsibility to proactively address our customer’s needs. Being able to engage with our customers at a Strategic level, whether that be about Digital Services, Enterprise Architecture, Data or ERP, meant that Version 1 were able to shift our conversations quickly and build services around the changing needs of our customer base. Having a track record of tried and tested methodologies means that you can adapt your services quickly. However, what Version 1 find most important is to be sensitive to their customers’ needs and listen, so that when there is a struggle, they know how to connect them with their support from the wider business.

In the last number of months, Version 1 have launched our Aspire Managed Services proposition. This moves away from the traditional MSP approach and shifts the focus to include measurement of business results and outcomes, not just service levels. This means that we proactively identify new ways to pivot to our customers’ evolving support, maintenance, and development needs in an increasingly disrupted marketplace.

Fundamentally, how we do things has changed, and standing still is not an option. Being reactive may keep the lights on but being proactive is where the real value comes in. This might look like making sure you put your rock stars in front of your customers when they need a bit of insight, it may be general check-ins that don’t always focus on work, and it may also be designing a service around what will make a customer sleep better at night, but always listen to what they are and aren’t saying, and it won’t send you down the wrong track.

About The Author

Claire Mullen is a Business Development Manager, here at Version 1.