Finding Freedom: From All Those Tickets - “Just the Facts Ma’am”

Written By Cassidy Stier

Welcome back Autotask Warriors. For those celebrating Thanksgiving, I hope you had a wonderful time with many thanks to be thankful for. Among other things I have been thankful about (other than turkey and mashed potatoes) is that you are taking the time to learn grow your business by reading this on a busy Monday.

Yes, I said Monday. Now, I do realize that there are some MSPs that are working normal Friday US hours today, but I truly hope that you are working in a chaos-free, growing, profitable MSP and were able to enjoy a 4-day Thanksgiving weekend at home or on the road with the family.

To those of you stressed out and not feeling very thankful this week, we see you.

You may not believe me, but it is absolutely possible to run or manage an MSP without needing daily therapy or working 100-hour work week. In fact, you can even go on that 10-day cruise without a laptop. (Really!) How? Well, first, if you’re feeling burned out, please read this. You’re no good to anyone if you’re not healthy. Second, we use the Autotask software and PSAutomation to automate your operations and the Advanced Global processes to train and empower your team to be Service Delivery Gladiators. Third by training the Team to do Service Delivery in the right way, everyone knows what to work on next, how to handle each step of the Client engagement, and you have happy Techs and raving fan Clients.

I know the last thing you want to think about right now with 247 open tickets in Autotask. We get it. Running an MSP takes a lot. If you don’t make time to keep up on things, it’s easy to get behind and miss out on some of the new, cool things in Autotask. In no time at all, you’re so overloaded with work, tickets, HR things, and everything else you don’t have time to do anything with Autotask but use it for basic out of the box ticketing, or if you are lucky, that expensive onboarding you got from AT’s Professional services many moons ago.

We work with lots of MSPs. One constant is that most MSPs are using out of the box Autotask/Datto RMM and/or don’t have the fundamentals down. This means we have to spend a lot of time fixing and teaching the basics – time that could be better spent actually helping the MSP team grow the business, earn raving fan clients, and being able to take that long family vacation or off the grid weekend.

So, we’re running an MSP Fundamentals Boot Camp series right here in this blog because the Advanced Global team have talked to so many burned out MSP leaders experiencing apparent mental health issues. This is not right, and we are taking a stand.

“Okay”, you say. “Where’s the beef?” “Show me the money!”

Here you go:


Take Control

As an Owner you can hopefully control the Sales Process, which Clients you choose to work with, which products you sell, etc. But what can your Techs control? The Service Delivery process.

We start with the Intake process. Our experience shows that 80% of the Chaos can be driven out of the work environment with a good intake process. That is why many of our articles focus on the Service Coordinator role as they are the core of the Service Delivery Team. They should be your 4th hire.

If you are a one-man band or just have a couple Techs, then someone still should be designated during your working hours to handle ticket triage. The Owner can do it if they have the time, or you can split the day amongst your techs. The important thing is that everyone knows who has the intake duty for that time block and that is on the schedule. And that every business hour has a designated Intake person.


Fundamentals – Ticket Title and Description

This series started at the beginning, covering the Service Delivery process. We started with entering a ticket. In week 1 I gave an overview of the Triage process. This is taking a new, raw ticket, distilling it to the just the facts, classifying it, and sending it on its way. Please see that for the fundamentals of what to do when a ticket comes in. In week 2, we covered the needs for an accurate Autotask database of all your Clients and their Contacts. A fundamental of Autotask or any PSA is having all your Clients and contacts in the system. (if you don’t you can watch this video on how to export what you have to send to your clients so they can correct). In week 3, we not only talked about the importance of ticket statuses but gave you the list that we coach our Clients to use. Status is important to maintain an accurate SLA clock in Autotask and also so that Management, Techs, and Clients all know the status of a ticket without having to bug the Tech. If you’re not familiar with SLA events and ITIL in Autotask, you should stop and read Week 3. In Week 4, we talked about the next thing the Tech or triage person needs to know when entering a ticket: The Priority. From our experience, the best way to identify, categorize, and guide customer requests into the right workflows is by using the Autotask Priority Field. So, we gave away our secret sauce for dividing incidents and MACs into 11 workflows and how to enter them into Autotask. In Week 5 we learned how to use Work Types which “track and categorize time your resources spend working on tickets or projects.” Work types modify the role rate of your Tech to the particular situation/ticket type. Say this is an on-site and you have a minimum billing of 2 hours or a remote ticket with a minimum billing of $100. The Work Type will do this. In Week 6 we talked about Estimated Hours and Queues. Autotask queues, “bring together tickets that have something in common, and resources who are assigned to monitor the queue and resolve the tickets placed into it. They are an essential ticket management feature.”   Last week we briefly interrupted our ticket entry to kindly ask you to stop killing your Service Coordinators and explained why they are so vital to a healthy, thriving MSP.


The Support Ticket

Now, back to the support ticket we’ve been entering. We started from the left side of the Autotask ticket entry window and went down. We have the Account name, the Contact, and status (new). We then utilized our priority matrix to assign a medium priority to the ticket and then assigned the Work Type. We put in 30 minutes for an estimated time and add it to the Triage Queue. We have a Ticket Category.

Now what? We need to enter the ticket description and title, confirm our initial queue and priority choices are correct, and assign the ticket.

Sounds, easy, right?

Well, here’s where the Service Coordinator or triage person can shine.

Skip the title and go right to the description. What is needed in the description is the facts of the request - and nothing but the facts. The less information in the description, the faster the Techs can read it, grasp what needs to be done, engage and complete the request.

This works best if you have a script of questions to ask the user. Things like “What is going on?” followed up by questions of how long the issue has been occurring and who is affected. Also, ask them if they have a thought on what the problem is as they use that system everyday and likely know way more than you do about it. Also, get any error message they have observed. Read that back to them to confirm you have the details right and then confirm the BEST phone number to reach them as they may be out of the office and want a call.

Now, remember back when we filled in the priority of medium? Well, we leave it there unless the user says multiple people are affected, their job is seriously affected or they say this not a big deal, and whenever we get to it is fine. You use the SLA list from your MSA with the Client to pick. Hint: ISP Outage for an office of 40 people just might be Critical.

Okay, so thank the caller for their patience and let them you are almost done. Take 30 seconds to cleanup the description (“Just the facts Ma’am”), pick a DESCRIPTIVE title that is around 5 or less words and type that in. The ticket title should be a summary of the description. It should immediately tell the Tech what needs to be done, without any when (urgent, help, immediately, etc.) information. That will be in the SLA.

Look at the title and confirm that the original ticket Queue and Work Type selected makes sense and change if needed.

Based on the ticket description you will either enter an appropriate issue/sub-issue type or you will enter “other” and “other” as it’s really the Techs job to figure it out. If you’re a Tech assigned to triage, then take a swing at it, otherwise other/other or TBD/TBD (my favorite) is the way to go.

Now, still on the left side, ensure the contract listed is correct for this type of ticket. If your MSP bills by device, you will likely need to look that device up in RMM, IT Glue, or get it from the user. MSP branded asset stickers prominently placed on supported equipment are a Godsend for this.

Confirm the ticket saves, thank the user for the information and assure them Team is on it.

At this point the ticket should be in NEW status and unassigned. If you have L1 Techs ready on the phones, you assign the ticket and transfer the call. Otherwise, end the call, look up your Tech Skill Matrix or who the scheduled Tech is for this timeframe and forward the ticket.

Keys to remember here are that a ticket description should always be just the facts and free of pleasantries and be enough info for the Techs to quickly understand the Client’s need.

Since you’ve read this far, let me also give you a Pro Tip. Rather than type all that in every time you take a ticket, you can leverage the Autotask PSAutomation and create a Speed code/Forms Template so that with a couple of clicks the standard priority, ticket entry form will be pre-populated. I’ve got a YouTube video here on how to do this.


Summary

You may not believe me, but it is absolutely possible to run or manage an MSP without needing daily therapy or working 100 hours a week. In fact, you (yes, even a Service Coordinator) can even go on that 10-day cruise without a laptop. (Really!)

The foundation of a successful MSP, small or large, is the fundamentals. And not killing your employees. So, we’re going back to the basics to make sure we’re all on the same page. Your homework for next week is go over this information with your Service Coordinator, get your phone script in order, and build out that Forms Template.

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Need Service Coordinator Training? Just want another pair of eyes on your Autotask PSA Software to see if YOU are fully using it? We can complete an evaluation that will tell you exactly what you need to fix or improve. Talk to us: info@agmspcoaching.com

Stephen & Co


Resources:

Cassidy Stier
Next

Finding Freedom: From All Those Tickets Part 7