A good Service Coordinator is worth their weight in gold! A Service Coordinator will also make the Techs 10% more efficient. Therefore,with 3 Techs or more, there will be enough gold to cover their weight at your IT MSP.

There, I said it. And I mean every word. Why? Well, since you asked...A good Service Coordinator will be the hub of your MSP, running all Customer request issues to ground, driving Tickets from New to Complete, and maintaining a keen awareness of everything Service Delivery related. And if you want Techs to be 10% more efficient (yes, we see this in the data all the time)…look no further than a superhero Service Coordinator. It goes without saying they justify their cost, including burden.

We recommend having the Service Coordinator position covered from early morning (6 or 7 am) until 5 pm. It is better to have the full-time Service Coordinator start early, as they will set the day for the Techs and be better at Triaging the early morning noise. This also helps them respond better to the Customer with those High and Critical requests (by the end of the day, nothing seems to be High or Critical anymore – it can usually wait until tomorrow). Having a Tech cover the Triage widget at the end of the day will work…but keep in mind that their quality of Triage is not the same as that of a good Service Coordinator.By the time there are more than 10 Techs, two Service Coordinators will be needed. From our experience, a Service Coordinator can provide high-quality work by being the “Hub of the Company” and “Customer Advocate” for about 10 Techs; after that, another Service Coordinator should be brought onboard.

What it takes to be a Service Coordinator

So, what does it take to be a good Service Coordinator?

Ownership of all open tickets.
Respect and appreciation by the Company, Techs, and Customers.
A NeutralAgenda between Ownership, Sales, Techs, and Customers, while favoring the Customer.
A sixth sense as to what is really going on in anyone situation.
Awareness of where every Tech is at and what they are working on - including when they are getting burnout and thinking of leaving.

What does it take to empower the Service Coordinator to be the hub of the company?

Here is an excerpt from our Service Coordinator Training agreement:

Prerequisites with Owner’s sign-off before we start Service Coordinator training

The Service Coordinator / Dispatcher is the hub of the company. If this person does not handle the Service Coordinator / Dispatcher job, then no matter what the rest of the Team does, the Customer will be disappointed, and Chaos will reign.The Service Coordinator / Dispatcher also needs to be the Single Point of Coordination (SPoC) for all Customer requests, which means they have to have a complete Ownership of the Techs calendar, workday, and duties.Service Coordinator / Dispatcher daily duties reviewed, adjusted if needed, and accepted. The Service Coordinator / Dispatcher is one of 3-Sys Admin and needs to know how to maintain the following:Dashboards, WFRs, Holiday Sets updated, &Renew Live Report Schedules, Giving Client Portal access.

How do you know if you have a Good Service Coordinator, or not?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the data. In this case, we are talking about two reports:

SLA Performance report when the First Response is set to monitor the Triage performance. Time and Time again, we see that if a Customer request is Triaged within a 1-hour SLA, the Tech Engagement SLA and Completion SLA will almost always meet expectations.
Service Delivery Forecast reports have the added benefit of monitoring Customer Requests that are being shepherded into all 11 Workflows. If so, there will be a double hump bell curve with the humps being around Medium for Incidents and Quick Hitsfor Service Requests.

There are other ways to tell if a Service Coordinator is doing a good job, such as:

Priority Distribution widget or report
Isthe “Ready to Engage” widget working for the Techs?
Are there no waiting tickets with no activity for the last two days?
Do all scheduled tickets have a future service call?
Do all on-hold tickets have a future due date?
Are all Customer requests estimated to take more than 4 hours to complete scheduled?
And the list goes on and on…

In other words, the Service Coordinator takes Ownership of all open tickets, including reviewing Time Entries as they go to Approve & Post. This is only the beginning of the rant on the value of a good Service Coordinator, so stay tuned for more of our perspectives on everything Service Coordinator related. How do we know the value of a good Service Coordinator? Because we only do one thing, and we do it very well:

We guide MSPs, using the Autotask software, to resolve Service Delivery issues.

Enjoy the read…

Should Your IT MSP Hire a Service Coordinator?