Five ways to get testimonials from your clients

I have interviewed a lot of MSP customers over the last few years, and I have never once had somebody sit down and say they only agreed as a favour. They agree because they like the company and they want it to do well, which is a much stronger motive than anybody gives it credit for. What stops the whole thing is further upstream than the ask itself. The client never gets asked, because asking sits nowhere in the business: not in a process, not on anyone's objectives, and not in the one system that already knows exactly who to ask.

That system is your PSA. Everything below is really five ways of getting a question out of it and in front of a human being.

The rule that decides all five

Get this one wrong and the other five are wasted effort, so it goes first.

The right moment to ask is an event, not a date. A quarterly sweep asks somebody to remember how they felt about you. An event-triggered ask catches them while they are still feeling it. The canonical trigger in an MSP is a complex ticket marked resolved, and the window has two sides to it: ask too early and the fix has not held yet, so the client is not yet sure they are happy, and ask too late and the relief has drained away and they are being asked to reconstruct something.

The part that surprised me when I first read the field practice on this is how short the window is. We had all been thinking in weeks. Crewhu, who sell CSAT and gamification into MSPs for a living and therefore watch this happen at scale, put the decay in hours: the moment the work is done and they tell you they love the work, ask. The request does not get refused, it gets buried under the next three tickets and never surfaces again.

1. Let the helpdesk do the asking

Your engineers are the only people in your business who are ever in the room at the moment of relief. The account manager is not there, you are certainly not there, and by the time either of you finds out that Tuesday went well, the feeling has gone. So the ask belongs to the person who closed the ticket.

The objection I get here is that engineers are not salespeople and will hate it, which is fair, and it is why the instruction has to be small enough that nobody has to sell anything. All they do is mention it. Something close to "we film short customer stories, would you ever be up for doing one?" is enough. Nobody is closing anything, they are flagging a name for somebody else to follow up.

Two details make it stick.

Give them a fallback that is not a no. Plenty of people are not comfortable on camera, and if video is the only offer then their discomfort reads as a refusal and gets logged as one. Offer the written version in the same breath. A three-line email you can quote is worth having, and roughly a third of the people who give you one will do the video six months later once they have seen what it looks like.

Incentivise the ask, never the yes. An engineer controls whether they mention it and controls nothing else, so scoring them on outcomes just teaches them to only ask the easy clients. Gamify the mention: a point for each one logged, a leaderboard the team can see, a monthly prize worth winning. This is exactly what platforms like Crewhu are built to sit on top of, and their published case studies are all the same shape. GO2 Tech went from 18 Google reviews to 130, adding four or more a month, by wiring the request into the ticket cycle rather than hoping somebody would remember. Their conversion from a positive piece of feedback to a public review settles at around 10%, which is worth holding on to as the realistic shape of this: nine people are pleased with you and one of them puts it in writing somewhere a stranger will find it.

2. Mine the tickets you have already closed

This is the one nobody does and it is free.

Somewhere in your PSA, filed under a ticket about a mailbox, is a line from a client that reads "honestly, I don't know what we'd do without you guys". It got read once by the engineer who fixed the problem, it made their afternoon, and then it was buried a thousand rows down and never looked at again. You are sitting on a folder of unsolicited praise and treating it as correspondence rather than as evidence.

Unsolicited praise is the highest-yield trigger there is, because the person has already volunteered, in writing, that they are happy. Nobody had to prompt them. Search your closed tickets for the obvious phrases and see what comes back:

• "thank you so much"
• "life saver" and "lifesaver"
• "couldn't run"
• "don't know what we'd do"
• "above and beyond"
• "brilliant" and "amazing"
• "so quick"

Each hit gives you a named person, a company, a date and their own words, which is a complete nomination and also the opening line of the approach. That matters more than it sounds, and it is the subject of the next point.

3. Never hand anybody a blank sheet

The reason a good client goes quiet on a testimonial request is almost never that they are unwilling. It is that "would you record a testimonial about your IT provider" is an open creative brief with no brief attached, and most people, asked to invent something flattering on the spot, freeze and then feel bad about freezing and then stop replying.

Which is why point two feeds this one. Lead with what they already said.

You wrote this to Dave back in March when we got the server back up. Would you be happy saying something like it on camera? We do the asking, you just answer.

Confirming something you already believe is a far smaller act than inventing something new, and the difference in reply rate is not subtle. The same principle applies to the chase, incidentally: if a nomination has gone quiet, a second identical email is the same blank sheet arriving twice. Change the shape of the ask before you change the frequency.

One hard line here, and I will not be moved on it. You show them their own words, you never write words for them and ask them to approve them. The moment a testimonial contains a sentence the client did not say, it stops being proof and becomes copy, and buyers can smell the difference at fifty paces.

4. Put it on the QBR agenda as a standing item

The quarterly review is the only meeting in the year where you and the client are already sitting down to talk about the value you have delivered, with the evidence open in front of both of you. You have just walked them through uptime, ticket volumes, the project that landed on time and the thing you stopped before it became an outage. Asking for a story at the end of that conversation is the most natural ask available to you, and most MSPs finish the meeting and let it go.

Make it a line on the agenda template rather than something you remember on a good day. The specific version works better than the general one, so point at a slide: "the migration in slide four is a genuinely good story, would you be up for telling it?"

There is a bonus in the room. QBRs are where you get the CFO or the CEO in front of you rather than just the IT contact, and a story told by the person who signs off the invoice is worth several told by the person who raises the tickets. Buyers watching your testimonial are looking for someone with their own job title.

5. Survey rarely, keep it brutally short

Surveys have a bad name in this industry because most MSPs run them the wrong way round, sending a long annual questionnaire nobody finishes and treating the result as a report card. Used properly they are not a report card, they are a search tool: the survey's job is to tell you who to ask, and then get out of the way.

Be realistic about what you will get back, because most people are not. Survicate's 2026 benchmark, drawn from 4,332 surveys across 460 companies, puts the median B2B response rate at 8.18%. That is the number a long, well-meant annual questionnaire is competing against, and it is why the annual questionnaire tells you almost nothing. The version that works in an MSP is the ticket-close survey: one question, one click, sitting inside an email the client was going to open anyway rather than in a campaign they were not expecting. Crewhu's ACE IT Solutions case study reports 24% survey conversion at 99% CSAT, and vendor case studies are always the good end of the range, but the direction of it is right.

So keep the standing survey to one question at ticket close, and reserve the longer one for once a year at most. Anybody who scores you top marks and leaves a comment has just raised their hand, and that comment is your opening line under point three.

The bit that makes it a system rather than a good intention

Everything above works. None of it happens without this last part, which is why I have put it at the end where it will be read as the conclusion it is.

Name one person who owns nominations, and give them a number. Five a month is a sensible starting figure for a mid-sized MSP, and it can be smaller. When an individual is responsible it gets done, and when it belongs to everybody it belongs to nobody and quietly stops. The owner does not have to be senior. They have to be the person whose week visibly contains the job.

A last point on why any of this is urgent. Proof has a shelf life, and BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 74% of people look for reviews written in the last three months, with 32% now wanting something from the last fortnight, up from 20% the year before. A wall of testimonials from 2023 is a wall of testimonials that says you used to be good. Which is the real argument for building a small habit out of the five points above rather than doing a heroic push once every two years: a programme beats a testimonial, every time.