We talk a lot at BrightGauge about transparency, trust, and communication. Those principles are foundations for our own team and operations, but we also advise our customers about why they should adopt these 3 standards.
At our sister company and MSP, Compuquip, we learned a lot about how far a business relationship can go when it’s built on trust, and we built that trust by offering our clients complete transparency through plenty of communication.
To be truly transparent, you have to share everything with your clients. Think about it this way: once the contract is signed, your clients don’t consider all the work your team is doing day in and day out to make sure that everything is working properly. As a matter of fact, they probably only think about you when something isn’t working and they put in a ticket for your team to fix.
That’s why you should be sending them a monthly summary of everything you do - tickets resolved, problems avoided by your constant monitoring, the number of hours you spent doing the work, and more.
Client reports serve two main purposes. First, a report is your chance to show each client how much value your work brings to their business. It’s an easy way to show them what you’ve accomplished for the month.
Second, reports are the best way to show your clients where you dropped the ball and need to improve for next month. Wait, clients should see mistakes highlighted every month? Absolutely. We realized at Compuquip that by being open about our shortcomings, we had to immediately be prepared to explain what steps we would implement to make sure the same mistake wouldn’t happen again.
What we realized during this process is that by being open and honest, our clients came to trust us more. They realized that we’re human, we’re all capable of missing the mark from time to time, and they liked to know that we already had a plan in place to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
There are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to creating your client reports:
Want to learn more about these 5 tips for getting started with Client Reporting? We’ve put together a free, 13-page guide on Best Practices of Client Reporting. Click here to download your copy: