A QBR that reports ticket counts tells the client what they already suspect, that they pay you and things happen. A QBR that prices the risks you are carrying and proposes specific remediation creates both renewal confidence and new work.
Lead with risk, not with tickets. Ticket volume is operational detail. What a client decision-maker needs is what is currently at risk in their estate, what it would cost them, and what you recommend doing about it.
Price inaction. 'Your backups are untested' is an observation. 'Your backups are untested, your finance system holds four years of records, and an unrecoverable failure would cost roughly this' is a decision.
Leave with agreed actions and owners. A QBR producing no decisions becomes a meeting people cancel. End with two or three agreed actions, each with an owner and a date, some yours, some theirs.
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Report against what you sold, not against metrics that flatter you.
| Metric | This quarter | Last quarter | SLA target | Met | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tickets raised | 284 | 311 | - | - | Down 9%; printer issues resolved at source |
| First response within target | 96% | 92% | 95% | Yes |
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Accounts rarely churn suddenly. They decline through rising ticket volume, slipping margin, and a quiet contact who stops attending reviews, all visible a quarter or two ahead if anyone is scoring them.
Margin erosion in managed services comes from scope ambiguity rather than from underpricing. Written exclusions are worth more than written inclusions, because disputes are always about something that was never listed either way.
Risk registers fail in one of two ways: everything scores medium, or the register is written once for an audit and never opened again. This one forces a treatment decision and a review date on every row, because a risk with neither is a note, not a managed risk.
Service performance against the SLA actually sold, a risk register for the client's estate with the cost of inaction and a recommendation for each item, progress since the last review, and a prioritised roadmap, ending with agreed actions and owners.
Quarterly for mid-sized and larger accounts, twice yearly for small ones. More important than frequency is that each one produces agreed actions. Reviews that generate no decisions get cancelled within a year.
By presenting risks with a quantified cost of inaction and a specific priced remediation. Clients decline vague recommendations and approve specific ones where the downside has been made concrete.
