Top MSP Challenges: Meeting Customer Expectations

In this continuing series, we examine some of the top challenges that Managed Service Providers face today and offer practical suggestions on how to tackle them.

With the rising popularity of the MSP model, businesses can now consume IT resources much like a utility, instead of building and maintaining all of the infrastructure themselves. This shift makes it easier for organizations to scale up or down quickly as their needs change, but it also creates a much greater dependence on MSPs for always-on, business‑critical services at a time when the IT landscape is rapidly evolving.

Most recently, the growth of remote and hybrid work has made networks more distributed and complex. Employees are accessing systems from a wide range of locations and devices, and technology providers are moving quickly to adapt their services to address the resulting cybersecurity and data protection risks. Backup, disaster recovery, and security services all need to be tightly aligned.

Of course, as business needs evolve, so do customer relationships and expectations. Clients are looking for strategic partners who can proactively protect their data, maintain uptime, and clearly communicate the value of the services being delivered.

A Different Approach

IT providers are accustomed to adapting to new technologies and the changing tides of the industry. Perhaps you’ve transitioned from a more traditional “break/fix” business model, or maybe you’ve followed the MSP model from the beginning. Either way, you are now in the business of managing relationships—keeping customers secure, productive, compliant, and confident in the services you deliver.

This has become all the more challenging with people interacting less in person today than ever before and with so much of your work happening quietly in the background. Nevertheless, relationships must be nurtured continually as a reminder that you are providing the always-on services that keep customers functioning and resilient when issues arise.

The client expects that you are out there, preventing unexpected disasters from taking place, especially when it comes to backup, data protection, and recovery. It’s up to you to proactively demonstrate your value, communicate what you’re doing on their behalf, and make it clear how your services protect their business every day.

Marketing

Marketing and sales teams must take great care as they work to differentiate themselves from the competition. They may be tempted to try and offer everything to everyone, when success may be much more practical while focusing on a specific niche, vertical, or clearly defined service stack, such as managed backup and disaster recovery. Clear positioning around what you do best—and who you do it for—helps prospects quickly understand how you will protect their data, keep their systems available, and support their long‑term goals.

Sometimes, Marketing teams can even unintentionally mislead customers by setting false expectations as to how a solution is deployed or maintained. Overly simplified messaging around backup, recovery times, or security features can create a gap between what a prospect believes is included and what is actually delivered.

Highly technical employees must be involved even at the strategic marketing level, so that there is a deep understanding of your managed service offerings, including backup, data protection, and recovery capabilities. Their input helps ensure that campaigns, collateral, and sales promises accurately reflect deployment models, service boundaries, SLAs, and ongoing operational responsibilities. Ongoing, regular technical training that includes members of the Sales and Marketing teams can help to avoid the possibility of over‑promising capability and under‑delivering to new clients, while also equipping them to speak confidently about the real value and outcomes your services provide.

Sales

It’s safe to assume that for most MSPs, the clear majority of their new customer leads will be arriving through their existing customers. Whether it’s word of mouth, a user group, an online forum, or testimonials and reviews – there is nothing more powerful than the voice of your satisfied clients. When Sales can clearly highlight tangible outcomes from current clients—such as zero data‑loss incidents over the past year, successful disaster recovery tests, or consistently fast restore times—those proof points carry far more weight in conversations than any generic marketing message.

Sales teams must adapt to continually service existing customers with a preventative mindset and leverage this into new sales. Instead of engaging only when something breaks, they should be proactively checking in, reviewing backup reports, validating recovery objectives, and sharing how they are improving resilience and reducing risk over time. These regular, value‑focused touchpoints not only strengthen trust, but they naturally create more opportunities to ask for referrals, testimonials, and case studies that fuel your pipeline.

This means a greater focus on long-term relationships, customer satisfaction, and retention than in the past. It requires structured account management, clear communication of SLAs, regular conversations, and consistent education of customers around evolving threats and best practices. By positioning the Sales team as a strategic partner that clearly explains how your services keep backups, disaster recovery, and security aligned in the background—and that regularly reinforces this value in simple, business‑relevant terms—you turn satisfied customers into your most effective and sustainable marketing channel.

( To learn more about the MSP challenge of Dealing with Difficult Customers.)

Outreach

MSPs must over-deliver in the realm of services to generate the kind of excitement that will encourage word-of-mouth referrals:

• Onboarding: An open and honest roadmap of the customer's onboarding process should be developed and made available to all parties involved. This sets the correct expectation of all actions, training, and documentation that must take place before the commencement of services.
  
  
• Reporting: Delivering reports to clients details the services and commitment you provide. It can also help to highlight areas of improvement. (For example, a backup report could show # of machines, # of backups, % of success, errors, etc.)
  
  
• Suggestions: The MSP should be proposing ways in which services can be improved and streamlined. You should be proposing solutions they may need in the future, long before the customer has even considered it.
  
  
• Health Check: Through all of this outreach, you should have your finger on the pulse of customer satisfaction. MSPs should not be afraid to utilize the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system as an important part of their MSP brand development strategy.

Service Level Agreements

Poor communication may be the single greatest weakness in unrealistic expectations from an MSP. You may deliver your services exactly as promised, and yet still meet with an unsatisfied customer as their expectations change. This is what makes Service Level Agreements (SLAs) such an important document for both parties. For the MSP, the SLA works to set correct expectations, and for the client, it gives them a way to hold the MSP responsible for their work. An SLA should include the full scope of services to be performed, a clear timeline, the responsibilities of each person involved, metrics, objectives, and the penalties for not meeting objectives.

At times, it may feel like an uphill battle for MSPs to achieve a steady stream of new customers while retaining existing clients who are willing to testify to your hard work. Through constant communication and frequent contact with customers, you lay the groundwork for a long and prosperous relationship. We’ll continue to look at the top MSP challenges further in this blog series, with great feedback from our own successful managed service providers. Speak with one of our experts to learn more about offering backup-as-a-service with NovaBACKUP Managed Backup.

Read Top MSP Challenges series - Dealing with Difficult Customers