Crewhu CEO Calls On MSPs To Reinvent Customer Experience

‘Response time is the number one reason customers leave MSPs,’ says Crewhu CEO Stephen Spiegel. ‘And it’s not just about the PSA timestamp. It’s about perceived response time. Did a real person reach out? Did they feel heard?’

At a time when many MSPs are struggling to grow or maintain customer loyalty, one vendor CEO urged MSPs to stop settling for mediocrity and instead focus on building what he called a “badass customer experience.”

“I will make sure you’ll be able to walk out of here, go back to your MSPs and tactically implement something that will improve your customer experience and help grow your MSP,” said Stephen Spiegel, CEO of Boca Raton, Fla.-based Crewhu, the maker of an employee recognition and customer satisfaction platform for MSPs.

Spiegel spoke to a room full of MSPs at CRN parent The Channel Company’s XChange August event in Denver this week and warned that most customer experience programs fail or underdeliver because of poor execution, a misfocus on vanity metrics or a lack of real team engagement.

“It’s not about the score as much as the amount of feedback you’re getting,” he said. “You need to understand what your customers are saying, and what they’re not saying.”

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He encouraged MSPs to view themselves not as another cost like a phone bill, but as an asset and a trusted partner who owns a piece of the customer’s mindshare. To do that, he said MSPs need to differentiate not just through uptime, but through proactive engagement, measurable service values and meaningful team involvement.

And a central theme was the importance of a process guided by a three-step framework: Ask, Easy, Engage. After sending an order, Crewhu can simply send a quick and easy survey for instant feedback, “Then we recognized and rewarded the team, and that reinforced the culture.”

A major element of his strategy is the set of non-negotiables that define a company’s values and expected behaviors, particularly around response time.

“Response time is the number one reason customers leave MSPs,” he said. “And it’s not just about the PSA timestamp. It’s about perceived response time. Did a real person reach out? Did they feel heard?”

Spiegel also showed real-time analytics that can be used to pinpoint performance gaps across core values which can signal missed upsell opportunities.

“Your team does great things every day,” he said. “If they go unnoticed, they disengage, just a little bit at a time. And next thing you know, you’re stuck. You’re not growing. You’re frustrated. You’re average. This is a team sport. You’re not going to win with just one superstar. You need a culture. You want to celebrate the small wins.”

Stanley Louissaint, founder and principal of Watchung, New Jersey-based MSP Fluid Designs, said one key takeaway that resonated with him beyond client satisfaction is that employee recognition matters just as much.

“It’s not about just what the customers say, but it's also how the employees feel,” Louissaint told CRN. “That’s one of the things a lot of people lose sight of when they’re in the weeds. It’s not only about customer satisfaction but also rewarding employees and letting them know the positive impact they’re having on the organization.”