Elevate Your MSP Services: 4 Strategies to Drive Customer Satisfaction
The global demand for managed services is fueled by the need for improved operational efficiency, robust security measures, and effective resource management to ensure organizations can focus more on their core business objectives. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is expected to total $5.61 trillion in 2025, an increase of 9.8% from 2024. This signifies that managed service providers (MSPs) have a huge opportunity to widen the scope of their portfolios by adopting cutting-edge technologies like Agentic AI and navigating complex compliance and regulatory landscapes within the industry.
While top-tier software and services for clients are essential, exceptional customer experience will set MSPs apart from a crowded field of competitors. 77% of business leaders recognize that offering personalized support and experience increases customer retention. The more satisfied your customers are, the more likely they are to continue using your services. High retention rates reduce the costs associated with acquiring new customers and provide a steady revenue stream.
In this blog, we’ll talk about four ways MSPs can enhance customer satisfaction:
1. Ensure Seamless Onboarding
When a new client signs up for your services, the onboarding process is their first real experience with you as their MSP; it sets the tone for your entire relationship with the client.
A positive onboarding experience increases customers’ likelihood of having a favorable view of your service. In fact, 63% of customers consider onboarding when choosing a service or product and making a great first impression is crucial. Think of onboarding as a bridge that connects expectations with reality, a link between a well-crafted initiation process and subsequent engagement levels.
Given the stakes, MSPs need to prioritize smooth onboarding processes. This is the best time to understand clients’ challenges and operational landscape and infrastructure — what software they use for daily operations and how they manage their data. Based on this information, MSPs must create a service-level agreement that helps provide transparency to the client.
AvePoint Elements is a modern multi-tenant management platform that provides MSPs with the ultimate recipe for expansion and retention with unique capabilities to empower your business. It is purpose-built to improve operational efficiency, offering Baseline Management to create and proactively manage configuration drift, ensuring multi-tenant consistency, promptly remediate deviations, and point-in-time backup and restore of tenant configuration and settings.
It features a Client Directory that leverages Nitro capabilities for easy provisioning and templatization, simplifying deployment, and supporting automation across each of your customers. This ultimately saves you time, automates your workflow, and allows you to focus on new revenue streams — all within a unified platform.
It also comes with delegated administration to grant MSPs more granular and time-sensitive access to customers’ workloads. This allows onboarding new customers and assigning onboarding responsibilities to people within the team.
The benefits of delegated admin for MSPs include:
- Improved efficiency. The division of labor paves way for efficient management, allowing tasks to be handled by specialized personnel.
- Enhanced security. Appropriately delegating administrative privileges ensures that the right people only have access, reducing the risk of security breaches and unauthorized access.
- Scalability. As organizations expand, the ability to delegate administrative tasks becomes crucial for scalable management.
- Better compliance. Enables detailed activity tracking to help with compliance and simplify the audit process while providing a clear record of who did what and when.
2. Provide Proactive Support and Monitoring
Businesses appreciate an MSP that can anticipate and resolve issues before they become problems. However, 52% of companies are concerned that an MSP would be more reactive than proactive.
Businesses that heavily rely on digital tools for daily operations need an MSP that can immediately respond to critical concerns or, better yet, anticipate them before digital workspace risks become problems.
Picture this: if your client has been a victim of a cybersecurity attack and was unable to access their digital workspaces in the middle of a busy workday, it disrupts communication and stalls productivity. If this issue takes several hours to fix, it will also cause significant downtime.
MSPs can proactively support their clients by regularly monitoring their infrastructure and workspace. This is an opportunity to identify risks and potential gaps, and offer remediation processes immediately, which could prevent critical concerns for the company.
These regular updates and check-ins foster a strong relationship between MSPs and clients, allowing for seamless communication. These frequent engagements regarding service status, upcoming maintenance, and any changes or potential interruptions in service delivery are highly appreciated by clients, leading to better satisfaction and loyalty.
AvePoint Elements provides a centralized dashboard across multiple tenants and Risk Monitoring to protect clients’ environments with proactive tenant security monitoring, enforce security rules to quickly address potential risks and rapidly resolve issues or notify users to take action.
AvePoint provides security, access, and data management, as well as Copilot with reporting in Workspace Governance. It scales governance of your customers’ digital workspaces using a streamlined, MSP-tailored solution that offers insights, controlled self-service provisioning, and templated policies to manage workspace lifecycle and governance efficiently across customer tenants.
3. Understand Business Demands
As technologies evolve and demand increases, MSPs are presented with opportunities to leverage new technologies and expanded demand for services as they come.
According to Canalys, compliance and regulation will be one of the challenges for MSPs in 2025 as they increase the liability partners face in delivering services, particularly those operating in certain verticals. If an existing client needs such service, and you can provide the expertise, it will help you retain this customer, signifying their satisfaction with the scope of offerings you can provide.
Moreover, understanding your clients’ needs presents an opportunity to drive the adoption of the latest technologies. Case in point: the AI and Information Management Report found that while 88% of organizations feel prepared for AI adoption, 95% face challenges during implementation, which is a golden opportunity for MSPs to help clients’ implementation. If partners are not educating themselves on how vendors are building AI improvements and using this knowledge to help customers define the return on investment of AI, they will lose out on the opportunity to influence the buying process and the potential managed services opportunities that may derive from that.
As you adapt to new technologies, Elements can help with adding new solutions into your offering portfolio easily and bringing together your migration, backup, security, and management products in a single, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. This quick and easy integration allows you to continue assisting customers without interruption as you scale.
Meanwhile, for clients looking to have AI tools, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, MSPs can offer services that can help address AI implementation challenges.
AvePoint’s Microsoft 365 Copilot Campaign in a Box Kit provides MSPs with tools and resources to help businesses prepare, secure, and optimize Copilot.
4. Obtain Training Resources and Certifications
By 2025, 66% of organizations are expected to provide training options for their employees, a notable increase from 59% in 2024. According to the CompTIA IT Industry Outlook 2025, this shift highlights a growing recognition of the importance of equipping existing employees with the skills necessary to adapt to rapid tech advancements.
As an MSP, your clients expect quality service, expert advice, and solutions tailored to their needs across various industries — the combination of all these will bring about customer satisfaction. To boost those skills, SMB customers are taking a dual approach: upskilling their own staff while also tapping third parties for help. According to our Global MSP Survey, 42% of MSPs work directly with ISVs and the majority (31%) are enticed by the advanced training they receive from ISVs.
The AvePoint Partner Program is one that offers a breadth of resources for MSPs, such as technical, marketing, and sales resources to help you achieve your goal — ensure customer satisfaction and boost revenues.
These resources are housed in an assets library on our Partner Portal that contains go-to-market guides, brochures, pitch decks, and access to a variety of training and certifications that can assist with sales motions and deal closures.
Unlock Your MSP Growth Potential with AvePoint
Like in any business, it is vital for MSPs to maintain client satisfaction to achieve a successful relationship.
A positive partnership with your clients will be an avenue to keep your existing clients as recurring customers and build your reputation. However, it is equally important to be equipped with the necessary resources to respond to clients’ growing needs and effectively provide the services expected from MSPs, such as seamless onboarding, immediately responding to risks, understanding gaps in clients’ workspaces, and responding to changing business demands.
Learn more about how to further scale your MSP operations and achieve business success.
Hazel Foz is a Content Marketing Specialist at AvePoint, covering Channel Marketing and Partner Programs. With years of experience writing for global e-commerce and B2B technology organizations, Hazel creates content that helps Managed Service Providers (MSPs), value-added resellers (VARs), and other partners navigate the rapidly changing digital landscape with insights on business growth and scalability, vendor support, integration, and more.
Amabel Palencia is a Content Marketing Specialist at AvePoint, covering channel marketing and partner programs, information lifecycle management, artificial intelligence (AI) readiness, data management, and cloud storage optimization. A journalism graduate, she has 15+ years of experience in project management, customer engagement, communications, and content marketing strategy for B2B campaigns. She creates content that helps MSPs and other partners navigate the rapidly changing digital landscape.
