Highlight names Jake Turnell-Willett to lead MSP community

Highlight has appointed Jake Turnell-Willett as MSP Community Manager. In the new role, he will lead a peer-to-peer community for managed service providers focused on customer-facing teams.

The initiative centres on The Watch, a group for UK providers that are growing and want a forum to discuss shared service and relationship challenges without sales pressure.

Turnell-Willett joined Highlight two years ago in a business development role covering the UK and Ireland. He will now build and manage the community, alongside a weekly newsletter and monthly podcast.

The move reflects Highlight's view that discussion in the managed service provider market often focuses more on technology than on the day-to-day demands of customer relationships. The new community is aimed at staff responsible for service delivery and client account management.

Customer focus

The project emerged from roundtable discussions with IT leaders in the retail sector. Those conversations highlighted recurring concerns in customer-provider relationships, including a preference among some buyers for smaller, more agile providers if that meant closer working ties and a better customer experience.

That backdrop has become more significant as providers pursue growth in a competitive services market. Some MSPs are also moving into managed services or expanding existing operations, creating commercial and operational pressures for teams that must match sales commitments with service delivery.

Peter Savereux, Director of Marketing at Highlight, explained the reasoning behind the hire.

"We are investing in someone whose job is to make the MSP community more connected, heard and influential when it comes to customer relationships.

"There is a huge amount of information available on the technical side, as well as plenty of content from vendors looking to sell more products. Those technical discussions are vital, but MSPs ultimately deliver a service to their customers, and the technology enables that service.

"We want to create a space for the people managing those customer relationships to talk openly about the challenges they face, learn from one another and find practical ways to improve the customer experience.

"For MSPs, growth increasingly depends on meeting customer expectations. When sales commitments go beyond what can realistically be delivered, the service team can be left trying to bridge the gap.

"At the same time, many providers are growing into or transitioning to managed services, bringing a new set of commercial and operational challenges. Highlight believes there is relatively little peer-level discussion focused on these issues, despite customer service, problem solving and relationship management being central to many mid-sized MSPs," said Savereux.

Community brief

Before entering the technology sector, Turnell-Willett worked in live entertainment and ran a theatre production company. During that time, he also created and managed a community for theatre companies to address shared industry problems through collaboration and peer-to-peer networking.

Highlight is drawing on that experience as it seeks to establish a community model within the MSP sector. His previous work gave him direct experience of the problems that can arise when information and working practices are fragmented across organisations.

Turnell-Willett said he is seeing similar issues in his work with customer-facing teams at service provider partners.

"In our work with the customer-facing teams at our partners, we keep seeing the same recurring issues. The problem is that people often don't recognise that their challenges aren't unique.

"We all like to give the impression that everything is going well and that every problem has been solved. But many providers have issues around customer perception, and struggle at times to connect what sales have promised, what the operational team can deliver and what the customer experiences.

"These are highly solvable, industry-wide problems, and sharing how to solve them doesn't take away anyone's competitive advantage. Yet people assume these are problems they have to solve on their own. Creating a space where MSPs can learn from one another can help move the whole industry forward, ultimately benefiting both customers and the organisations that serve them.

"The best things happen when you get the right people in a room together. The Watch is where we will put that into practice and help MSPs grow while strengthening the reputation of the sector as a whole," said Turnell-Willett.

Broader trend

The launch points to a broader shift in the MSP market as providers face pressure not only to maintain technical standards but also to show that account management and service delivery are aligned. For mid-sized providers in particular, customer retention and reputation can depend on how well those teams manage expectations, communication and problem resolution.

Highlight develops a service observability platform used by managed service providers, carriers and enterprise IT teams. Its latest community effort is intended to support the people who sit between service operations and customers, an area that often receives less attention than technical functions.

As part of that effort, The Watch will focus on practical peer discussions about customer relationships, service consistency and the gap that can emerge between what is sold and what is delivered.