Here's a great success story from one of our MSP partners - PC Assistance in Little Rock, Arkansas. Enjoy!
When PC Assistance launched its managed services business in 2005, it first explained the idea to a small group of its top customers and asked how they could be best served.
The Little Rock, AR-based company, which opened its doors in 1994, wanted to step up from offering break-fix assistance to managed services solutions but needed to be certain its key clients were on board with the change and understood the potential benefits.
“Our engineers continually walked into break-fix situations blind and we found that we were doing a lot of band-aid work,” says Ted Clouser, Executive Vice President for PC Assistance.
“We did a good job to get people up and running but it seemed inefficient,” he says.
Clouser began exploring managed service solutions, a process that ultimately evolved into the company’s own offering, a five-tier, escalating package called IT Assurance that features N-able’s N-central remote monitoring and management platform at its core.
But to get there the company turned to its underlying business philosophy of trust-building with its clients.
“We felt like we had to have a successful implementation in place before we offered managed services to our entire client base,” says Clouser.
Support for Business Transition
“We got verbal confirmations from three of our top customers that they would stay with us as we transitioned to offering managed services solutions,” he says.
“Basically, they allowed us to field test our managed services with them for two months to learn how to become efficient in the implementations and to see what would happen,” Clouser says.
“It was a valuable learning ground with companies that we knew would trust us. Then, as new clients called in, we were able to confidently and knowledgeably encourage them in that direction.”
As a measure of its business principles, PC Assistance has not altered its pricing model for every client that signed on for its managed services solution in 2005.
Currently, the company has about 1,000 nodes, including 200 servers, under remote management using N-central.
Clouser says that much of the company’s 80-per-cent uptick in profits in 2009 and its revenue growth stems from its managed services business and the trust underlying those customer relationships. PC Assistance currently works with 85 managed services customers out of a total of 300 clients.
“N-central was absolutely essential to us taking our services business to the next level,” Clouser says. “With N-central, we know everything about our clients, we know what’s not working, when it stopped working and how to access it remotely,” he says. “N-central is the key to that knowledge.”
PC Assistance’s engineering staff, which accounts for 10 of the company’s 16 employees, has benefited greatly from the N-central technology, Clouser says. Many of its engineers and support people have been with the company for more than a dozen years.
N-central Makes Life Easier
“Our engineers were dreading the break-fix fires they were going to walk into,” Clouser says. “But with N-central we can see things in the network that we wouldn’t otherwise see. N-central added a quality of life for all of our engineers.”
Clouser says that PC Assistance has the highest regard for its relationship with N-able.
“You will never feel alone when you’ve chosen to use N-able,” he says. “Their support is second to no one. We didn’t just buy a software package with N-central, we bought into a company.”
Clouser says that PC Assistance’s bond with N-able has allowed it to build upon its greatest asset, a belief in trusting relationships with its customers.
“At the end of the day our customers want a fair price and want to know that we value them,” he says. “We respond to everyone the same way. We care if their systems are down. We want our clients to feel a value in doing business with us.”
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