Profit driver 4: Client Satisfaction

How does client satisfaction impact profit?

IT Services buyers have become a lot more sophisticated over the last decade. Not to mention, demanding. The basics of service delivery are now a given. They need to be timely, affordable and high quality. Not to mention more innovative and increasingly tailored. How do you keep clients fully satisfied in a hyper competitive IT services market, especially if your IT organization is product led or in the midst of transforming from a product-led business to a services one?

It’s a fine balancing act of managing:

• sales pressure against service delivery
• client expectation against sales promise
• aggressive pricing against actual resources required
• promised timelines against available resources
• maintaining the heights of past service excellence

Small adjustments are constantly required to maintain the balance. No wonder client satisfaction can sometimes dip, closely followed by profits.

High performing IT Services organizations are able to manage the balance, fine tuning their sales and service delivery to maintain strong client satisfaction.

Achieving that delicate balance results in persistent profitability.

It’s time to profit

Our IT clients have mastered the art of balancing client satisfaction through our Professional Services Automation system that integrates sales with service delivery. It allows them to:

• Align sales with service delivery to ensure what is sold can be delivered - profitably
• Deliver a shared understanding of the client across the entire organization so that the delivery team understands the sales context and vice versa
• Impose a common sales and service delivery process across the organization so there is no misunderstanding or ambiguity over who owns each part of the service delivery
• Ensure the delivery team can input their expertise into the sales cycle and avoid client dissatisfaction resulting from unrealistic delivery expectations
• Involve the delivery team in solution creation and thereby anticipate resourcing requirements at an early stage