More and more enterprises are looking to MSPs to manage their IT functions. At the same time, more and more MSPs are brokering SaaS vendors’ solutions to their customers in order to position themselves as “full service” providers.

So when one of these SaaS solutions experiences a problem―as, for example, Microsoft Office 365 recently did―it reflects badly on the MSP’s brand and undermines customer satisfaction. MSPs brokering SaaS services therefore need to figure out how they are going to cope with such problems. In particular, they need a way to ensure that they are highly proactive and transparent when it comes to communicating with their customers about SaaS quality-of-service issues.

Not all MSPs realize this. Many just cross their fingers and hope for uptime. And when there is a problem, they do little more than just try to keep their customers calm during the outage.

But this is wrong. Customers now view the MSP as the equivalent of their own IT organization. They expect their MSP to be the first to alert them about any problems that may affect the business. They demand straight, accurate answers when they ask what and who is affected. They want continuous status updates. They believe they are paying the MSP to be their advocate in dealing with any issues the SaaS vendor may be having. And they’re right. In fact, even after the issue is resolved, it is incumbent upon any MSP brokering an SaaS solution to help ensure that such problems don’t happen again and take the necessary actions to prevent future occurrences. These are the situations that make or break an MSP’s image in the mind of a customer. Additionally, MSPs will be increasingly offering SaaS solutions of their own. In all cases, properly managing user experience that results in high user satisfaction will be critical to MSP long term success with their customers.

This is why WatchMouse is so valuable to MSPs. With WatchMouse, MSPs can continually and automatically monitor their brokered SaaS solutions for user experience issues. Plus, if and when such issues occur, MSPs can proactively notify their customers via the web and maintain up-to-the-minute online status updates. They can assist external SaaS providers in pinpointing the problem and more quickly resolve issues with their own internal SaaS provided services.

Expectations of end customers will continue to grow with regards to MSPs as they become more and more dependent on them for IT management. We are excited to offer this newest Nimsoft capability to assist in the effort.