IT Service Providers aren’t connecting with IT customers. That’s according to the Global IT Service Providers Harmony Report from LogicNow, an integrated IT Service Management platform provider. Indeed, rather than find ‘harmony’ between IT Service Providers and their customers, the survey found much more discord between what customers need and expect from their Managed Services Providers and those providers are delivering.
More than 1,300 IT departments and nearly 700 IT Service Providers were surveyed across eight geographies that LogicNow operates in, including North America, UK, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Benelux, France, and Australia & New Zealand with the goal of understanding market needs and whether or not they were being met. The responses were fairly consistent across the globe.
Some of those needs aren’t being met at all and that IT Service Providers’ offerings aren’t matching IT Departments’ priorities. IT departments initially reach out to IT service providers to help them with an immediate, business-critical need, but where IT service providers consistently go wrong is in trying to offer a wider, more consultative service. That may sound like a wise approach if you’re a provider, but prioritizing this above addressing the immediate requirement doesn’t sit well with customers, particularly since IT departments rank the provision of CIO consultancy at the very bottom of their priorities.
Alistair Forbes
This was a surprise for LogicNow who expected to see good alignment between the two groups, but that isn’t the case. “That’s a potential stumbling block for IT Service Providers,” says Alistair Forbes, general manager for LogicNow.
The lesson learned from the survey is that there’s an opportunity for service providers to align their pitch or proposals more accurately with what their respective clients are looking to buy.
“That would enable them to have a better level of engagement early on and secure initial work with that client and build more into a strategic managed services proposition,” notes Forbes. “It’s not that IT Service Providers shouldn’t talk about all they can do, it’s a matter of how they present it.”
It comes down to understanding what the IT manager’s requirements are and tailoring their proposal around that and then maybe getting into a discussion of what else they can offer at a later time.
“That’s how they’ll have a higher success rate,” opines Forbes.
What IT managers are looking for is often expertise they don’t have on their team, assistance with a capacity issue, or outsourcing some IT tasks to supplement the internal team.
“It’s usually based on a specific problem set or project they want to carry out,” explains Forbes. “That’s what we’re suggesting they need to understand better and to reflect back in the proposals that they give.”
When things go wrong, often what you have is a failure to communicate and that was another of the survey’s findings. There was an additional disconnect between IT Service Providers and IT departments in how their relationships should evolve. Fully 64 percent of IT service providers were interested in having their customer relationships move towards greater strategic consultancy and offering them wider, more diverse knowledge-based services. Unfortunately, only 13 percent of IT departments felt the same way with the remainder split evenly between wanting no change at all, and wanting more focus on tactical, technical IT support instead.
Another troubling finding from the survey was that the Managed Security service provision was flawed. When asked where managed security offerings should improve, IT departments were looking for better e-mail security, better web protection, and better anti-virus solutions. Meanwhile, IT Service Providers were more focused on prioritizing security consultancy and offering more proactive system updates and patching –indicative of the misalignment in the aforementioned relationship between the two groups. IT departments ranked both of these “improvements” to the Managed Security offering at the bottom of their priorities.
The fourth big disconnect was what IT departments considered unfriendly pricing structures. Here, 76 percent of IT departments want to pay for managed security services with a single invoice on either a monthly, quarterly or annual basis that encompass all the charges for all their IT security needs, combining technology licenses and associated services. That’s in contrast to the way 49 percent of IT service providers currently invoice, either for every individual technology or on an ad hoc basis. Compounding this disconnect is the knowledge that 66 percent of IT Service Providers are not planning to change their invoicing processes in the next 12 months.
“Data in the survey suggests that service providers aren’t delivering what their customers are looking for in terms of a single, simple consulting invoice for everything they’re delivering that they can present on a monthly basis of whatever it’s going to be,” states Forbes. “It seems like they should be giving them a simple billing mechanism on a regular basis, but quite a number are not doing that yet—and are billing separately for the product element and software licenses.”
Forbes adds, “All of our services to services providers are wrapped up in consolidated invoices they get from us and they provide their clients, but we’ve found that’s not the case and we will continue to promote that model.”
He thinks that getting this message across will take some time because if it was easy they’d have already done it. “It’s either a mindset shift or process or systems that they have to go through,” says Forbes.
The good news derived from the survey is that IT managers are comfortable with using outside resources. That surprised Forbes.
“There isn’t this big divide that is sometimes portrayed or perceived of IT Service Providers diminishing their value or threatening their position. That didn’t come across at all.”
Another positive is that the market opportunity for Managed Services remains vibrant with every geography surveyed expressing a strong interest for outsourcing IT, and that IT Service Providers have a strong track record of closing Managed Services deals.
“The main issue, however, is the risk of getting the relationship off on the wrong foot and ultimately the amount of potential profit being left ‘on the table’ by the mismatch between the priorities of service providers and IT departments,” says Forbes. “Fortunately, this is a problem for which the solution is entirely within the control of the service providers.”
Does Forbes expect these findings to change the way LogicNow goes to market? “Certainly in terms of our educational content there are things we can focus on a bit more in relation to this proposition area and how to address that gap,” he responds.
For an IT Service Provider, Forbes suggests their next step should be reworking their marketing and sales approach reflecting what’s important to an IT manager and making sure what they’re proposing is aligned as well.
Seems easy enough.
Download the full ‘Global IT Service Providers Harmony Report’ here.
