You could learn a lot by watching what Amazon does as a company. It may be much larger than yours, but there are certain actions and guiding principles from the company that are worth paying attention to.
Whenever you hear an Amazon executive talk about new features or products, it’s always through the filter of what customers are looking for. In Amazon’s worldview, everything starts with the customer, whether it’s a new cloud service or a change on the Amazon.com website.
When asked about Amazon’s approach to AI at a AWS re:Invent press conference in November, AWS CEO Andy Jassy began his explanation to assembled reporters by saying, “What drives us is what customers tell us matters to them.” It’s a common theme from Jassy. Additionally, when he was asked about the company’s new on-prem hardware called Outposts, he said, “when we think about Outposts, we are really trying to solve a customer problem,” he told reporters.
This customer-oriented focus truly starts at the top of Amazon’s hierarchy. In his annual letter to shareholders last year, Jassy’s boss, Jeff Bezos, continued the theme. “How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it. It’s a combination of many things, but high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it,” Bezos wrote at the time.
MSPs take heed
You may not be the size of Amazon, but you can still have this same fanatical attitude regarding customer service. As Bezos added in that letter to shareholders, “What do you need to achieve high standards in a particular domain area? First, you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.”
This isn’t something that’s limited to a huge company. It’s the kind of approach that any company of any size can and should be striving to achieve. The service part of the MSP is what you need to keep in focus at all times, and you should absolutely be aspiring for domain expertise. That is why your customers are hiring you. They lack a certain technical expertise, and they are looking for guidance from you.
Of course, even a company the size of Amazon stumbles. They have the advantage of size and riches to pick up the pieces and try again. You shouldn’t be limited by your resource capacity if you are keeping your eyes firmly focused on the customer, just as Amazon tries to do.
Photo: Jeramey Lende / Shutterstock.
