Make your techs feel like rockstars with positive feedback!

One of the best things you can do as a manager or owner of an MSP is offer feedback in a way where your technicians are left feeling awesome about themselves!

At Support Adventure, we’ve worked with over 40 MSPs, observing their internal culture and communication style with staff. The ones that we have enjoyed working with the most are the ones that had the most motivated technicians. 

So just how can you achieve that?

By making your techs feel appreciated with positive client feedback that you relay to them. You can easily collect feedback using a client feedback form with your ticketing system, providing invaluable information on their level of satisfaction. This will leave your technicians feeling good about the hard work they’ve put in, which we like to call rockstar feedback. You can also incentivize your staff to do their best by creating a bonus scheme to reinforce great customer service. The feedback, both positive and negative, creates a great opportunity for mentoring and improving your service further.

To help your techs feel like rockstars, you can:

1. Make them feel appreciated by highlighting their wins.
2. Balance out negative feedback by highlighting great work they’ve done as well.
3. Create a bonus scheme.
4. Collect positive input with a client feedback system.
5. Mentor your staff so that they perpetually improve.

Client perception is truly the focal point in your business, whether you realize it or not.  Communicating satisfaction to technicians is crucial if you want to provide great, consistent service.

Validate technicians so that they feel appreciated

Knocking out tickets is only a part of the technician’s job. The other part is interacting with the clients via phone, email or chat. 

If techs are kept in the dark about how clients feel about their efforts, it can be demotivating and create a company culture of low morale. Knowing how clients feel is also a good litmus test for technicians to know how good of a job they are doing and if there is something that can be improved.

If you only speak to your technicians about negative feedback, it will create a false image of their work. You’ll end up creating an environment of only negative reinforcements, which can be extremely detrimental. Techs must feel motivated instead of unmotivated and low on enthusiasm.

Build a great team out of positive reinforcements resulting from technicians getting the whole picture of how clients feel.

A client feedback system easily delivers an abundance of positivity

When you hear great stories about your technicians from customers, why not let the  technician hear about it too?

Creating a customer feedback system where clients can fill out a form that is built into every ticket is a simple way to collect heartwarming reviews. 

Even for negative feedback, this system is a good way to gather information without constantly confronting staff as your first reaction to any mild complaint. We’ve seen instances where the only communication techs receive about clients is negative. Avoid creating this type of dynamic with your staff at all costs.

The customer feedback system benefits the client too as they get to express how they feel about your service and their impressions of your MSP. This will make them feel cared about.

Introduce Incentives like Bonuses

When you make it a practice for your clients to speak up about your service, you will have clear data on a technician’s performance. You can then use this data to assess how well each technician is at customer service and making clients feel awesome. 

Make sure you keep techs with those great people skills satisfied with their role so that they continue to grace your MSP with their presence and dedication! 

And what better way to motivate them than with money!

Appreciation can come in many forms, and one that speaks the loudest is indeed cash prizes. 

So how can you execute this? Try the following:

• Make it an incentive that the technicians with the most positive client feedback get monetary rewards at the end of the month. You can have 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishes to gamify the approach.

• Coupons are a great way to engage your techs in a friendly competition as well. The reward can be handed over to the technician with the most tickets solved or the fastest response time.

• A simple “congratulations” can also go a long way in making people feel validated and respected for their contributions. You can congratulate the techs who got the most reverse-escalated tickets.

Have fun with the approach. It won’t take too much extra time to incorporate these ideas into your helpdesk. The result will be positive as validated technicians will be even more motivated to continue doing a great job!

Mentor your way to a great team

Ticketing systems can be used for more than just keeping track of incidents. Reverse-escalations, as mentioned above, are a great way to mentor less experienced technicians.They don’t require much time and they are done while solving a ticket.

So how does it work? Here are the steps:

1. A technician assigned to a ticket has 30 minutes to resolve an issue.
2. If they cannot solve it within 30 minutes, they escalate it to a senior technician.
3. The senior technician solves the problem and writes ticket notes that explain how they arrived at their solution.
4. The senior tech then reassigns the ticket to the original junior tech who first worked on it, hence the term “reverse-escalate.”
5. The junior technician reviews the robust notes written for the ticket, which educates them on how to resolve a similar incident for the future.

This form of feedback in writing gives techs a chance to review and refer to documentation when they find themselves in doubt. It also creates a system where all technicians work as a team, relying on each other for assistance and growing their knowledge and experience.

Systems, procedures and patterns used to organize and sustain your MSP are the skeleton needed for providing great service. Your techs are the joints and muscles of that system, giving purpose and life to your MSP. 

If you want to have a functional system working in synchronicity, you need your techs to work as a team supporting each other. 

Mentoring is something that is often overlooked in MSPs, which is a shame as it has the following great benefits:

• It strengthens cooperation.
• It fixes weak spots in the helpdesk. 
• It makes techs feel truly accepted. 
• It upgrades their knowledge. 
• It improves internal communication. 
• It provides for an exchanging of ideas.
• It contributes to the overall health of your company.

Overall, avoid communicating only when bad things happen

Make your techs feel like rockstars by letting them hear about the positive impact they’ve had on your customers. They will be encouraged to continue with the great work they’re doing. If you only talk about the bad and not the good, you can become a Debbie Downer of a boss. 

That’s why having a built-in client feedback system is so helpful because it does the work for you in noticing all the good that’s happening in your company. And friendly competitions or bonus schemes will also reinforce your technicians’ desire to perform at their best.

We’ve seen techs earn notable incentives this way. The MSPs these technicians work for are keeping important customers and gaining valuable new ones regularly!

Word of mouth is the best form of marketing because it stems from real customers experiencing actual value. What makes the strongest impression on clients is the attention, empathy and care they are shown.

With experience finding positions for over 200 remote technicians and other help desk professionals, while helping 100+ MSPs hire remote staff, we are confident in our ability to meet your staffing needs. For more details or to become a client, please visit our MSP Staffing services page.

From our years of experience, we’ve had a unique bird’s eye view on how successful MSPs run their business. Knowing both the needs of the technicians and the companies, we love to help MSPs like yours take your operations to the next level. So feel free to reach out to us for premium consultation that can help you scale and reach your goals for your business.