We brought on a new client at the end of last year — a small real estate development company. Prior to working with us, they had spent years (decades, actually) as clients of the same managed IT vendor.
Things had always gone well… until that vendor was purchased by a larger company. Once that happened, it didn’t take long for our client to experience decreased levels of support, in terms of both responsiveness and service quality. So they contacted us and soon came on board.
This is not an unusual occurrence. Many of our small to midsize clients come to us along the very same path: a trusted vendor gets bought by a larger (usually non-local) entity and suddenly, things change.
Find Your Match
Of course, many large vendors, IT-related and otherwise, provide a perfectly fine customer experience to their clients. Among those that do not, one cause we often encounter is that larger companies may not view their smaller clients as important.
You would think that paying three, four, or five thousand dollars a month for support would earn you the attention you need to run your business. But that’s just a fraction of the fee a much larger company may be paying that same vendor.
So it’s not surprising those clients are the ones that receive the best service. After all, every company, regardless of size, has capacity constraints. Resources are always finite and they can only afford to dedicate so much to account management, client relations, and (most important) sufficient staffing of engineers.
Companies tend to devote more of their scarce resources to their largest, most profitable clients. If your company is among the smallest — whether right from the start or due to the vendor being acquired — you are last on their list of priorities.
Keep in mind as well that larger companies are more likely to be beholden to short-term profitability and the bottom line. Unlike a company like ours, of which I own 100%, these companies typically have to answer to outside investors — people whose sole interest is in the value of their investment, not client relationships.
All that to say that it’s an oversimplification to think of a given vendor as offering “good” or “bad” service across their entire customer base. You have to also consider where you fit relative to their other clients. How big a fish are you in their pond?
Be Specific When Asking for References
This line of thinking applies to how you check vendor references.
You don’t want to just speak with “clients.” You want to speak with clients who look like you in terms of size, industry, and applications used. The closer a match you can find, the better a picture you will get of what life as a client will be.
Also, if you can find “back door” references — clients of a prospective vendor that you uncover and contact on your own rather than those that the vendor offers up — you are even more likely to get truthful answers.
Final Thoughts
The more integral and essential to your business a given vendor, the more important it is that you find a good match.
All things being equal, look for vendors who are specifically geared towards serving companies of your type and size.
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