Finding Freedom From: All Those Tickets (with Queues)
DattoCon is Over! Did you survive?
Greetings, Earthlings. Welcome to Autotaskia. The land where we speak all things Autotask.
Not my usual intro, I know, but I felt like something different this week. Maybe it was to just remind everyone that regardless of the outcomes of elections, we are all of Planet Earth. And, hopefully, all Autotask users.
Actually, it just sounded cool. And everyone likes Marvin the Martian. Or perhaps Robert Heinlein?
How about Dilbert, “Greetings, earthling. I bring you either wisdom or planetary annihilation. The choice is yours.”
Odds are that you read the above and just nodded and went to this paragraph. Some of you are absolutely shocked that I missed the usage of the phrase in your favorite book, movie, or graphic novel. I probably just lost half of you to AI searches where you are trying to find the reference of even the history of the phrase.
In a way, this is kind of like the Autotask experience. There are 10-year users who do things a certain way, people who have joined over the years, and new Autotask users who have no idea what a Speedcode is but love Forms Templates. Many of them are used to what they learned at the time and haven’t kept up.
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. Why, when we could do this for $5000 in weekly online training? 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. This may be the only time we give it away, but the last 5 weeks and next few are all about helping the MSP community. By the way, If you’re feeling burned out, please read this. You’re no good to anyone if you’re not healthy.
So let’s get going. Of course, DattoCon is now over and you likely came home with a whole bunch of new software and great ideas. So maybe, you’ll look at your Autotask next year….when you have some time. No! You need to stay focused on the ball and not be distracted by the shiny – you need an optimized PSA and all of the Service Delivery Fundamentals in place to be positioned to have a great 2025. MSPs need to start those fundamentals now – so call this pre-season training camp.
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 – Queues and Estimated Time
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.
Last week 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.
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.
Now, here is where it can get a little different. If you noticed at the top of the ticket, there is something called a “Ticket Category. You can read about it here. This allows an Autotask admin to change the layout and options on a ticket in that category. So, while the default “Standard” category is just fine to stay in, many MSPs will adjust the ticket layout from the default section next in our ticket from “Assignment” to “Ticket Information.” Many Service Coordinators like to have “Ticket information” next as that is what they need when entering a ticket from a client phone call.
We’re assuming you have the default layout and we are going to skip assigning a resource and enter the estimated hours. Now, if you’re a small MSP (all Techs) or have a technically orientated Service Coordinator, you may be just looking at the issue and putting in a guess from experience. Or your dispatcher just puts 30 minutes for everything. When we are engaged with an MSP in a “build-it-for-you” program, we create Workflow Rules, If you are using Issue-type and Sub-Issue Type, that fills the estimated time based on your MSP’s resolution averages for the sub-type. So, an incident of type: “Application” and sub-type: “Accounting Software” might be auto filled in for 30 minutes. This is a great way to have the techs figure out the averages and then leverage Autotask to make that decision for the dispatcher.
“Wait,” you say! How can I fill in the estimated hours if I haven’t filled in the issue type yet? Great question – see WFRs above! (We did talk about WFRs earlier in the series and I will talk about them again, but feel free if you are a Gladiator Community member to ask at the Member calls on Thursdays and Fridays).
Next question you have to answer is what queue this is going to go in. 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.”
Queues can be a political or religious discussion, but I suggest starting with:
Client Portal – This queue is hardcoded by Autotask and required. This is needed by Taskfire (don’t ask) and tickets entered by users into the Autotask user portal go here. The best practice is to have a Workflow Rule that moves new tickets to the Triage queue, and for the most part, this queue should be empty.
Post Sale – This is a required queue by Autotask and is used to facilitate the opportunity won wizard. When an opportunity closes, a procurement ticket is created automatically and put into this queue. Some rename to Sales and use for all their sales tickets.
Monitoring Alert - is a queue provided by Autotask, and it makes sense to keep the high volume of RMM alert tickets from swamping the Triage queue.
Support is the primary Service Delivery queue and, thanks to Autotask Dashboard/Widget vision, is the only queue the Support Team needs. Using one support queue has fewer chances of a ticket being overlooked, and there is less mechanism moving tickets around that could go haywire
Merged - Tickets that have been merged
Triage - New tickets start here. If the only ticket being Triaged has the status "New," then a Triage queue is not needed. However, in our reality, re-triaging is a real thing and an MSP process that we need to accommodate. Just putting a ticket back into "New" status is not the best as it sends a confusing message as to what the next steps are.
Projects - Projects are a very different type of Customer request and need a very special workflow. It is the only workflow where the Customer is not notified of every service call scheduled, where a unique skill set is always needed to work the tickets, and where tickets remain open longer than any response SLA
Sales - We also would prefer Sales stays out of Service Delivery; therefore, the best practice is to move their tickets into a queue where they can sit until the cows come home. Probably not needed for a small MSP.
These are just the basics. There are certainly cases of having more, so feel free to drop me an email if you have questions.
Okay, so a user called in with an issue and you’ve got all their information and have selected the “Support Queue” for the ticket. Now we’re ready for the Service Coordinator to shine. Next week, my friends. We’ve covered a lot today.
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 can even go on that 10-day cruise without a laptop. (Really!)
Ther foundation of a successful MSP, whether small or large, lies in the fundamentals. So, we’re going back to the basics to make sure we’re all on the same page. Your homework for next week is to get your Queues set up in Autotask and come back next week as we continue with Chapter 7.
Better hurry and develop a Triage Mindset before that next new tool shows up on the credit card. Those DattoCon vendors are going to be calling. Not enough time? No worries - drop us a line, and we can help with our Service Delivery Fundamentals Improvement program or Small MSP Improvement Program.
Talk to us: info@agmspcoaching.com
Come see me at the 2024 CMIT Conference next week. Mention you read this blog and I’ll give you a limited edition AG lanyard. (and maybe a special deal – shhhh!)
Stephen & Co
Resources:
NEW: Check out our 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