In addition to being a front-line level of protection from downtime and data loss, Watchman Monitoring is designed to be a profit center. IT Professionals combine the reports we find with their years of experience to create a value added service for their end users. In-house IT administrators leverage our best-in-class issue detection to stay ahead of their co-workers needs. In either case, the Contact Menu helps meet the needs of end-users, and streamlines communication as people work to get questions resolved in an orderly fashion.
The first step in making this work for an IT consultancy is to define a service agreement.
Building your own Support Agreement
Subscribers to Watchman Monitoring have used a few approaches as they implemented proactive support in their consultancy. Here are some of the more common solutions:
- Offer the monitoring service at no charge.
- Create a one-time fee for basic monitoring, for the life of a computer.
- Enroll people into a monthly plan, based on early detection of issues, and other value-adds
The right answer will vary based on what you feel is best for you, and your customers.
Give away the service for free?
If you run a retail store, or are billing by the hour for your services, Watchman Monitoring will help you generate more income as you get your agent installed on more computers. The peace of mind you can generate will help build loyalty, and give you the opportunity to reach out before problems get so bad that your customers have a bad experience. The value of these customers as brand ambassadors compounded with increased service revenue from resolving issues can help increase your bottom line.
Do you have customers who contact you to solve a problem, and then never again?
Your challenge here is capturing a greater share of the consumers wallet. Consider offering these customers Watchman Monitoring for a set period of time for a specific fee. If they aren’t frequent customers, it’s unlikely that they’ll opt in to a new recurring charge, but may be willing to pay for guaranteed monitoring for the next few months. (Especially as they’ve likely recently experienced how painful it can be when something on their machine fails.)
Do you have customers who contact you about machines other than their own?
Consider a subscription service for anyone who brings you a machine that they don’t specifically use. They’re likely responsible for a bunch of different machines being used by people with varying levels of tech-savviness. They’ll gladly pay for the peace of mind that comes with knowing this machine is being monitored for issues – even if its main user doesn’t know the difference between a kernel panic and popcorn kernels.
Now that you have a better idea of the different ways that you can offer proactive support through Watchman Monitoring, I encourage you to formulate a proactive support plan for your business and start executing on it! To make your launch a little easier, we’ve put together a launchpad coupon that will supercharge your monitoring capabilities for the first two months – while you establish your proactive support model. Simply reach out to us by email at support@watchmanmonitoring.com and we’ll help you get started.
More of a visual learner? Check out the video version of this post here.