Is your MSP drowning in service tickets and requests?
Are your technicians overworked and can’t seem to keep up with ticket and alert volumes?
Are your margins and productivity hurting and not up to industry standards?
If you’re facing any of the above challenges, you’re not alone. Hundreds of managed service providers (MSP’s) face the exact same challenges as those listed above. This article talks about best-practices that MSP’s can adopt to help them navigate the support world using proactive maintenance as a powerful leverage.
Proactive support includes all of the maintenance that MSP’s perform for their small business customers to keep their networks free of trouble and errors. Some of these include ensuring enough disk space is available on computers, the latest security patches are installed, end-point security or anti-virus software is in place and updated, data backups are taking place as per schedule, drives are being fragmented regularly etc.
Follow our 3-step plan to streamline board alert noise and ticket counts, and improve productivity levels for your team.
- Automate: Automation is probably the most overused term in the managed services world today. But its without a doubt the future of IT management. Automate as much of recurring tasks and maintenance as possible. Everything from setting up your clients with RMM agents to clearing disk space when drives fill up are possible with automation using the advanced remote monitoring and management tools of today. This one-time investment can save your technicians hundreds of man-hours of work as well as improve service levels for your clients.
- Perform regular maintenance – Proactive maintenance is critical to managed services contracts. Keep those backups running seamlessly, stay on top of critical security updates, ensure that your clients are protected with end-point protection (Anti-Virus) at all times. The more you are on top of proactive maintenance, the lesser is the failure and problem rates on your client’s IT infrastructure, which means lesser tickets and alarms for your team to work on.
- Fine-Tune your RMM – Your remote monitoring and management solution is a toolkit that needs to be leveraged to its full extent. RMM tools are becoming increasingly powerful in terms of their capabilities. But that also means that they are monitoring a lot more and hence generating a lot of alerts. This can directly lead to unwanted noise for an MSP, and a huge productivity killer for their service team. Make sure that your RMM is fine-tuned to monitoring what it’s supposed to, and not what it can. Leverage cross-product and 2-way integrations with PSA and other tools to ensure that tickets are auto-closed when alarms heal, requiring minimum intervention from your team.
Hopefully, you can apply and implement the above best practices to your managed services business and see some useful results.
