IT Support Agreements: 7 Qualities of Good Clients

IT support agreements differ hugely from client to client. Over time, you’re sure to find that there are some that you (and your staff) thoroughly enjoy working on, and others that seem like a serious chore.

In this article, we talk about how to identify the “good” clients. Admittedly, you can’t always tell which IT support agreements will be with “good” clients until you start to work on them. But over time you should begin to develop a sixth sense.

So, here is a list of seven qualities that you will probably recognize in the good clients:

1. Prompt Payment - Prompt payment for IT support agreements is obviously desirable from a cash flow perspective, but it’s not about that alone. Clients who pay promptly respect their suppliers. They also have good cash flow themselves, and organized internal procedures. These factors are a fairly good indicator that the companies will be professional to work with.

2. A Willingness to Listen - IT support agreements are there so that businesses can access expert advice on technology, yet some company owners remain adamant that “they know best” because they read the technology section in the Sunday paper. Clients with a willingness to listen are a pleasure to work with. Not only do you avoid frustration, you also end up with infrastructures that are easy to support - because they’ve been designed the way you suggested.

3. A Clear Chain of Command - When you’re working with a professional client, you’ll always know who to report to, who’s required to sign off on expenditures, and who processes your invoice payments. When things are more haphazard in nature, you’ll probably find the client relationship more challenging.

4. Clear Business (and Technical) Priorities - Clients who are “scattergun” in their approach to projects can prove very frustrating to work with. A clear business strategy makes it easy to construct a clear IT strategy.

5. Sensible Working Hours - Obviously working hours vary from business to business, but well-managed businesses respect their staff enough to give them a sensible work/life balance. If you visit a client site and everyone seems frazzled and over-worked, it’s indicative of an environment that’s badly organized or a culture that doesn’t value its employees. If the employees are not being valued, it’s extremely unlikely that the people delivering the IT support agreements will be.

6. An Ability to Make Time for IT - If you are to deliver an effective partnership with clients, you need to work with people who set aside time for technology. There’s nothing worse than managing directors who bark five minutes of orders, and then disappear while there are still ten follow-up questions on the tip of your tongue. You can be sure that those same managing directors will be quick to criticize if something isn’t done quite the way they envisioned – even when the reason for it is their own inability to prioritize and manage their time.

7. A Risk-Averse Attitude - You don’t want clients who are willing to “cross their fingers” when a server warranty expires. You don’t want clients who insist on all their passwords being the same, “because it’s easier. You don’t want clients who will let their summer interns install unlicensed software, and you don’t want clients who won’t let you buy a UPS because “they’ve never had a power outage.” All of these things will eventually become YOUR problem. While it’s nice to work with people who are laid back, there is a fine line between laid back and irresponsible.

After reading this list, you can probably identify with several of the points, and recognize the qualities (or lack of qualities) in some of your existing client base.

So when you’re next talking to a potential client, keep this list in mind and see if you can spot any clues. Over time, you may learn to separate the good clients from the bad at an early stage.

What percentage of your clients on IT support agreements are “good” clients?! Let us know in the section for Comments below. 

And to follow-through on the tips introduced in this short article, be sure to download your free copy of the special report on IT Service Contract Secrets for Getting More Repeat Clients and Recurring Service Revenue. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr Bernardo Barlach