I have to take my hat off to the crew at Autotask. I recently asked some questions of those working with them and I am shocked to see the response from the community.

Not shocked that they are involved in the community but rather shocked that so many in the community took the time to stand up and speak about their overwhelmingly positive experience in working with them.

We all are busy growing and running our businesses each day and as small a task as it seems it can take a decent effort to share our experience about a vendor. In my experience you are much more likely to have someone take the time speak up about their negative feelings in working with a vendor than to take the time to share a positive experience.

Some one that has had a bad service experience is likely to tell everyone they know about it (these are detractors) while someone who has a good experience is likely to remain silent about it. It is only the user that has a remarkable service experience that takes the time to say good things about the vendor (these are promoters). These promoters are worth their weight in gold when it comes to growing your business and having credibility in the market.

% promoters minus % detractors equals a companies net promoter score.  This comes from Net Promoter Score and is what we utilize at Everon to measure our customer satisfaction. I encourage everyone to use the measure as it brings great clarity for your employees and fantastic insight into your business. I truly believe as stated on their site that “net promoter score is the single most reliable indicator of a businesses ability to grow”.

I do not know if Autotask uses NPS in their business but I would suggest based on the response to my post that they would have a high score in the community indicating a continuation of their fantastic growth and success.

Congratulations to everyone at Autotask and thank you for being out there helping MSPs succeed.

JC

It may seem like a funny question on the surface and as we always say at Everon “what’s the question behind the question”?

Well I am curious if they are easy to do business with?

My experience to date has been with their product evangilists – ever wonder why it seems you see Autotask everywhere, well beyond a big marketing budget they hire independent consultants to be out in the marketplace talking them up.

At first I was impressed that they seemed to respond to blogs and be involved in the community, so much so that I proposed they participate in our blog as Connectwise, Dell, and other have done but things just seemed to go into a black hole from there. Perhaps they don’t feel that a bunch of smart, highly educated, good looking, business minded folks like you and I (that is how I like to think of our readers) are the approprate target audience for their tool?

I am very interested to know if their involvement in the community is just on the surface or if they are truly out there contributing to the community they are so desperately trying to move to their product. One thing I have always been impressed with working with Connectwise is that Arnie- love him or hate him – is out there looking out for each and every one of us day after day.

Anyway, I am curious if anyone else has had a similar experience or if this was just my experience.

JC

If you are not familiar with these tools you should take some time to check them out as they are both powerful tools for your MSP business – you would use one or the other. We can talk more about the specific comparisons of the tools later.

I have spoken with Arnie Bellini, CEO and founder of ConnectWise many times and they way he describes his tools partner network is fantastic. He says things along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing here) ‘if we are going to beat Dell and Microsoft as they enter the MSP market we need to stop being territorial, break down the walls of our Kingdome, fill in the mote, and work together to service clients’. I have always agreed with this and in fact Everon does not employee field engineers, we give all of our field work to partners so that we can service clients in any area of the country.

I also recently read someplace that Autotask has announced the ability to outsource jobs through their tool as well. Bob Godgart (Autotask’s CEO and founder) explained his vision as making is simple for providers to send tickets back and forth to each other through the Autotask tool. I have not had the opportunity to speak with Bob personally but believe this is the right direction for their tool and the industry.

I have seen a much wider acceptance of sharing information about clients with each other than in the past and I would argue that these types of networks are vital to our success as a group. At Everon we demand a high level of sophistication from these types of partner networks – I dispatch a partner to service my client across the hall the same as I dispatch a partner to service my client in Geneva the way my business is setup and we have yet to find one solution that meets all of our needs.

In fact I would suggest that at some point down the road the providers of the various tools and partner networks should come together, break down their walls, bridge their motes and provide a more powerful more complete partner network than anyone of them has been able to provide on their own.

Wouldn’t that be something!

JC

PS – there are many other nationwide partner networks out there that we utilize or have researched, let me know if you want to talk more about them and our experience.