Yes, you should. (Sorry to be so blunt...) Here are 5 reasons why.
Impact your bottom line
Since you are the IT specialists, you’re probably going to be asked about PC problems anyway. Why not be prepared to turn it into recurring revenue? (Hopefully you are already monetizing customer support and computer training as well!)
It’s one of those areas where, if you price it right, you can see a reliably solid profit margin. Be sure to charge what it’s worth, and here’s a great article by Richard Tubb on that topic to guide your thinking.
Lock in customer loyalty
As you position your business to be a strategic partner for your customers, it’s helpful to grow your reach outside of just your IT points of contact.
Servicing PCs provides significant opportunities to make inroads and gain raving fans in all parts of the customer’s organization. You get to be the hero who swoops in and helps people get back to work.
This improves customer retention for the simple fact that it would be much harder for them to replace you due to the depth and breadth of your relationship.
Land and expand
PC service can be a useful part of your land-and-expand strategy, increasing your per-customer revenue.
We’ve written before about land-and-expand opportunities such as software training. You need services that fit well into your overall ascension model, that quickly and predictably move the customer from one success milestone to the next.
Research by McKinsey shows that customers who take an upsell stay longer, so there is value in getting customers to buy more sooner.
Customers crave peace of mind
Worrying about laptop and desktop uptime is a concern for your clients. By offering PC service, it shows that you understand their pain and are on their side. In exchange for their peace of mind, you get to boost your monthly recurring revenue. Not a bad deal.
Improve ROI for your customers
Help your customers think about expensive downtime in a more inclusive way. Explain that network problems and connectivity interruptions are only a small part of downtime. True downtime is anytime that employees’ work is negatively affected by poor technology performance.
When Joe is waiting for an application to load on his desktop, this is downtime. When Betsy is waiting for slow web pages to load on her workstation, this is downtime. When Joaquin and Ariya are waiting for pages to print, this is downtime.
The team over at Imagine IT wrote a nice article about the true costs of this type of slow performance downtime. They estimate that a small company of 10 employees could lose more than $12,000/yr due to these little wasted minutes each year – OUCH! That makes a monthly PC maintenance contract seem like a no-brainer.
