Finding Freedom From: All Those Tickets - Part 2
DattoCon is Coming! Are You Prepared?
Hello, Autotask Gladiator. Welcome back to this little section of the world where I try and use all my years of MSP Operational Improvement and Service Delivery experience to help you grow your MSP without going insane or working yourself to exhaustion.
As I mentioned last week, I’m working on version 2.0 of our Small MSP Improvement Plan (SMIP) to make it more relevant, more effective, more affordable, and faster to implement, so you get your ROI faster. And DattoCon is coming up quick, with all those vendors hawking their shiny new tools. Tools which MSP owners-already buried in tickets and Service Delivery Chaos-will buy, further distracting them from the fundamentals of MSP Service Delivery and profitability. Time is running out to sort this out. Let’s go!
You may think that a small MSP (less than 5 Techs) is a completely different beast than a large MSP. Yes and No. A small MSP may utilize less reporting, fewer queues, workflow rules, and such, but the fundamentals are the fundamentals are the fundamentals. So, while this is geared more for the small MSP, the following is for ALL MSPS. So listen up!
Legendary basketball coach John Wooden had members of his national championship UCLA team, and his star recruits, spend their first practice learning how to put their socks and shoes on. There were high level athletes, but he knew his players couldn’t bring their A-game if they had blisters. Wooden knew that excellence started with the fundamentals.
Vince Lombardi, one of the greatest football coaches of all time, started every season with the basics, assuming nothing, after blowing the National Championship game in 1960. He would never lose in the playoffs again.
Tony Dungy said, “It's not necessarily who has the most talent but what team sticks together and executes their fundamentals the best.”
James Clear says, “…it is not just football and basketball where this strategy is useful. Throughout our lives, a focus on the fundamentals is what determines our results,” and, “…small choices, daily habits, and repeated actions can have on our lives. Without the fundamentals, the details are useless. With the fundamentals, tiny gains can add up to something very significant.”
So, what I am trying to say in the preceding 202 words? That the fundamentals of being a successful MSP- with happy Techs, raving fan clients, and the elusive work/life balance apply to both small AND large MSPS. If you get the fundamentals down, you can then decide how far you grow.
“Great,” you say, “Now what?” Back to Vince Lombardi, who said: “Stay hungry, remain humble, and get better today.” He also said that, “The only place that success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
Bill Belichick’s philosophy was “Do your job.” That was it. He trained his players to focus on only what they can control.
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. And we can take a page from Lombardi and work on getting better every day. The Japanese call the idea of continuous improvement “Kaizen,” but it was invented by American Edwards Demming in 1947, so I think we can handle it.
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. We have found that if we improve the intake process, the Tech Engagement and Resolve SLAs would improve organically. That’s why many of our articles focus on the Service Coordinator role and tools.
If you’re an Owner with a couple Techs, your 4th hire should be a Service Coordinator. Your Service Delivery Team needs Freedom from all those tickets, and the SC is going to help you get there. We start with the Triage process. (Note: If you are a one-man band or just have a couple Techs, someone still needs to Triage tickets and. The process below will be very valuable for you.)
Last week 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 basis of what to do when a ticket comes in. This week, I want to start building out the selections you make when triaging a ticket.
Remember that someone should be designated during your working hours to handle ticket triage. Preferably a Service Coordinator, but if you don’t have one, 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 it is on the schedule. And every business hour has a designated Intake person.
Fundamentals – Accounts and Contacts
Now that you have an intake person to handle triage, they need to know what to do with the ticket. There are different ways to create a ticket. We will start on the left side of the ticket in the Account section.
The first thing you see after clicking Create Ticket (from the Create tab at the top of the Autotask home page) is a required blank to add the Client into. Note that in your Autotask, Clients may be called Accounts or Organization.
What now? Remember those famous coaches started with the fundamentals. So shall we, no matter how long you’ve used Autotask.
A fundamental of Autotask, or any PSA, is having all your Clients and contacts in the system.
We’re going to be working in the CRM module. You may want to bring up the Autotask documentation.
Owners or Operations Managers, go to the CRM module in Autotask and make sure that you have entered all your Clients. This should be the legal name (if you use QuickBooks, it’s easier to copy the name from there), address, phone number, locations, the Primary Contact, who on your team is the Account Manager, Status, and their Classification. Fill in everything you can.
On your new Client records, look at the three vertical dots on the right side next to “To-Dos.” Click that and familiarize yourself with other things you can do down the road with that Client. Click on Locations and add in all your Client locations. Don’t get hung up on location naming – you want a standard, but you don’t want to be like many MSPs that get paralysis by analyses. Take no more than 30 minutes to pick an address standard and move on. Many MSPs are quite happy with listing locations by city and function like “Nashville HQ” and “Lexington Branch Office,” or address, like “5600 Monroe St. HQ” and “4080 Bennett Satellite Office.” Autotask’s default for the original location is Primary Address, which may work well for you. You may also want to include a “Remote” location to assign to remote workers.
Now, go back to the 3 dots menu. Click on “Account Alerts,” read the description, and enter in any information you want to pop up during ticket creation – an example might be “Never call between 12-1” or “Closed Tuesdays.”
Fantastic! We now have all our Clients/Accounts/Organizations into Autotask, so when your team member enters or triages a ticket, they can make sure the correct Client is used. This will populate all the information needed to start the ticket and provide needed information on the Client.
Going from top to bottom, in the left section of the ticket creation windows, you are next prompted to add the contact. According to Autotask, “A contact is a person at an organization who is associated with the entity you are creating or editing.” It’s very hard for a Tech to be successful when they don’t know who to call to fix the problem, so we want to make sure that we have a current list of all the Client contacts in Autotask.
Even if you did this when you onboarded the Client, if you don’t have a process to continuously update Client Contacts, they are out of date. Work with your Client contact to get a current list of all the supported users and enter/update that into the “Contacts” section of the Client record. You can reference the Autotask documentation here.
For the contacts, you want to make sure to get their title, office phone number, and if at all possible, mobile number. Add into your onboarding process to capture the personal email addresses of new employees so you can add that to “Email Address 2” field. This allows users to enter tickets when their company email is broke.
With Autotask now containing up to date records of your Clients and all of their staff, you can now move to the next blank to fill in on the ticket: The status. But that is a topic for next week.
Summary
The foundation of a successful MSP, small or large, is the fundamentals. So we’re going back to the basics to make sure we’re all on the same page. Take this week to get all your Client/Account data up to snuff in Autotask, and come back next week as we continue with Chapter 3.
Go do it now. DattoCon is coming soon, and that room full of vendors will have some great deals. Better hurry and develop a Triage Mindset before that next new tool shows up on the credit card. Not enough time? No worries - drop us a line and we can help.
Talk to me: info@agmspcoaching.com
Stephen & Co
Resources:
NEW: Check out my YouTube channel
Service Delivery Gladiator’s Community: Home - The Service Delivery Gladiators (agmspcoaching.com)
Unshackled e-book: https://www.agmspcoaching.com/unshackled
(Learn how to apply the 6 keys to MSP Service Delivery Optimization)
“The Compound Effect” by Darren Hardy
“Think Ahead” by Craig Groeschel
Hey, MSPs with less than 5 techs. I’ve been talking to the team about a major revision to our Small MSP Improvement Program (1-4 Techs). This will be a more affordable program designed to get you up and running in 8 weeks, fix the bad stuff, and get your team on track for the next level. When you have more Techs and a Service Coordinator, you’ll be ready to advance into our Service Delivery Foundational Improvement program. If you would like to tell me what you need/want in this program (or be part of the beta) drop me a line at info@agmspcoaching.com.