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Rachel Murray

By: Rachel Murray on January 30, 2025

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How To Develop A Strong Relationship With Your Managed IT Provider

Managed Services | IT Support

You’ve taken great pains to start a new partnership with a managed IT services provider.

You’ve compiled recommendations for different providers. You’ve done your research to learn about their services, support, pricing, and reliability. You’ve signed a contract and completed their onboarding process.

At this point, you may be wondering, “How do I ensure a successful MSP partnership?”

In this article, we’ll explore the critical factors that can shape your MSP alliance. After reading this article, you’ll understand why you need to invest as much time and energy into nurturing your MSP partnership as you did searching for a provider.

You’ll also learn 6 essential components of a successful client-MSP partnership.

With this information, you’ll be able to establish a mutually beneficial relationship that will help you use technology to gain a competitive edge, meet regulatory compliance, and fuel your business.

Why Is Developing A Strong Relationship With Your MSP Critical To Your Business?

Whether this is your first time using managed IT services or you’ve recently switched providers, it’s necessary to start your newly established relationship off on the right foot.

Trust is a cornerstone of any client-MSP partnership.

Developing a solid foundation built on trust will allow you to gain peace of mind, with the assurance that the provider will deliver on its promised solutions to solve your IT challenges, such as strengthening your cybersecurity posture, providing risk management, and supporting business continuity and disaster recovery.

On the flip side, the provider will gain confidence in the relationship knowing that your mutual, open and honest communication will help them fulfill those promises.

6 Steps To Develop & Maintain A Strong Relationship With Your MSP Partner

When you join forces with an MSP, you’re welcoming them into the fold. They’re now part of your team. As with any new team, you need to spend time getting to know each other to see how you can best work together to reach your shared goals.

The following guidelines will provide a roadmap to establishing a strategic partnership:

1. Prioritize effective communication

  • The first step in establishing a strong alliance is to ensure that you have open lines of communication.

  • For effective communication, both parties need to know who the main points of contact are for your organization.

  • Once you’ve identified the key stakeholders, it’s important to define the roles and responsibilities of team members within both the client and the MSP. This can ensure that both parties know who to contact for specific issues and help prevent misunderstandings.

  • Regular check-ins and status updates, including monthly on-site visits by a technical alignment manager (TAM), help further ensure a trusting and collaborative union.

2. Review your IT needs

  • It’s crucial that you supply complete information throughout the process so that the provider can fully understand your business priorities and identify critical systems.

  • You should periodically review those identified priorities to confirm the established metrics are still meeting your business needs.

3. Set clear goals and expectations

  • As the relationship develops, the client and provider should ensure that both continue to have a solid understanding of the expectations and responsibilities of both sides.

  • Ensure that the processes for support and escalation are clearly communicated, along with the parameters for prioritizing and resolving those requests.

4. Emphasize timely reporting and decision-making

  • Businesses should make their managed IT provider aware of any possible changes that could affect the managed IT services provider agreement (MSPA) or SOWs as soon as possible.

  • For instance, if you want to add on services, you’re expecting staff hires or departures, or you’ve recently started using desktops that had been in storage, you need to tell the provider. Prompt change orders can ensure that you’re being billed correctly for the right support.

  • It’s also important that decision-makers within your organization make timely decisions for approvals. This can save you money. For instance, if a provider has a limited time to take advantage of a vendor discount for certain IT equipment, but you don't respond in a timely manner, you could miss out on significant savings.

  • Slow decision-making and not providing key information needed by the MSP in a timely fashion can also gum up the works by slowing progress (or preventing the work from even getting started).

  • At the same time, clients should also expect to receive responses to their questions within a reasonable timeframe.

5. Promote transparency and accountability

  • To create transparency, it’s important to craft well-defined service level agreements (SLAs) and detail the escalation process for critical support. In doing so, providers can generate the necessary metrics to accurately assess the effectiveness of the support and progress to date.

  • Quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are essential to strengthening client-MSP relationships. These meetings allow providers an opportunity to showcase their performance, while discussing any challenges or unexpected issues that popped up during the three-month period.

  • Both you and your MSP can use QBRs to verify that the work being done still aligns with your business goals.

  • QBRs also give businesses a chance to raise any concerns they may have about the quality of support, service, or SLAs.

6. Be flexible

  • In the ever-changing world of technology, the unexpected can, and likely will, happen. Businesses need to allow providers some leeway when an inevitable bump in the road happens.

  • At the same time, providers need to be adaptable, with the ability to scale services and support to meet a client’s changing business needs.

The Bottom Line With Strengthening Your Client-MSP Partnership

When teaming with a managed IT service provider, you’re allowing the MSP to gain a bird’s eye view of your business and IT environment.

With responsive managed support, your business will gain the network monitoring, tech support, and security tools you need to satisfy regulatory requirements and ensure that your business can continue running smoothly and efficiently well into the future.

Pairing with a knowledgeable MSP can mean the difference between spinning your wheels with unresolved IT issues and getting the right IT solutions you need to meet your current technology needs and long-term business objectives.

After reading this article, you now recognize the importance of trust-building from the start of your MSP relationship. You also now know the steps you should follow to create a partnership that’s built to last.

We write articles like this to provide business owners like you with useful information you can rely on as a trusted resource to help you make the best decisions for your business—regardless of whether you choose to work with us or another provider.

Discover the true ROI of managed IT here. Check out this article to find out about common pay terms for managed IT support.

If you’re just getting started on your MSP search and want to learn more about how much it may cost, use our payment calculator to get a free, instant estimate.

About Rachel Murray

As a Project Manager at Kelser, Rachel ensures technology projects are planned, executed, and completed on time and within scope. With expertise in project management methodologies and a strong technical background, she keeps projects on track and helps companies meet critical timelines. Rachel excels at clear, efficient communication and often bridges the gap between clients, management, and engineers to drive seamless execution and deliver results.

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