Merry Christmas to Our MSP Community!

Written By Cassidy Stier

As we approach the end of 2024, I want to take a moment to reflect on the year we’ve had in the MSP industry. It’s been a year of highs and lows, with some businesses thriving and others facing significant challenges. I see you, and I want you to know that you’re not alone.

I’ll talk more about the New Year next week.   My message for this week is: Merry Christmas! I hope you get everything you wish for this holiday season. More importantly, I hope you can take some time off to relax and recharge. It’s crucial to avoid working yourself to exhaustion trying to catch up on client service requests. Use this holiday season to celebrate Jesus if you believe, and enjoy the gift of family, friends, and loved ones.

If you’re feeling depressed, tired, burned out, or stressed, please know that there are mental health resources available for MSPs. You should be able to take a Christmas Vacation without having to bring your laptop or be on call. If you need better automation and process, call my Advanced Global team. If you need mental health assistance, check out this blog post that lists several resources to get help.

Hopefully, this doesn’t come as a surprise, but MSPs use Autotask software and PSAutomation to streamline (automate) operations. Many also employ Advanced Global processes to train and empower their team to be Service Delivery Gladiators. By training your team to handle service delivery correctly, everyone knows what to work on next and how to handle each step of client engagement, resulting in happy techs and raving fan clients.

I mention that Autotask is AUTOMATION software because many MSPs forget that PSA stands for Professional Services Automation, and they just use it out of the box as a ticketing tool and maybe a timecard.

Simply put, many MSPs don’t have the fundamentals down. And it costs them in time, money, and mental health.

Not only does this mean that the MSP will likely be in constant Chaos, with unhappy management, Techs, and Clients, but this means we must spend a lot of time in our engagements 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. 

And our current series joins the chat: we’ve been focusing on helping MSPs get back to the fundamentals using Autotask. My goal is to help you build a strong foundation for your service delivery in 2025, setting you up for growth and success.

Football has training camps where they cover the basics and so do we. That’s what we have been doing the last several weeks. The basics are so you can have some breathing room and be able to move to the next level. “Next Level MSP.”  I like it – sounds like a game show.

As the famous football coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Excellence is achieved by the mastery of fundamentals.”

This series started at the beginning, covering the service delivery process. We began with entering a ticket.

  • Week 1: Overview of the Triage process – taking a new, raw ticket, distilling it to the facts, classifying it, and sending it on its way.

  • Weeks 2-6: Essential elements your Autotask needs to properly enter a ticket.

  • Week 7: A plea to stop overburdening your Service Coordinators and an explanation of their vital role in a thriving MSP.

  • Week 8: Completing the hypothetical ticket our dispatcher took over the phone.

  • Week 9: Reviewing one of the best sets of Issue Types and Sub-Types I’ve seen.

  • Last week: We covered Incoming E-mail Processing

All this setup work is incredibly valuable. Why? Because it makes phone calls and texts dramatically quicker and easier to enter accurately, and it can be used for other ticket entry methods, making them faster and more efficient.

Let’s talk about email. If your tech is copying and pasting emails into tickets, they’re wasting time and money. Ensure that client requests are going into Autotask. We’re done with emails going to the owner, techs, or a support mailbox that staff checks occasionally. All tickets need to go into Autotask automatically via email or Client Portal or be entered by your intake tech or office admin from phone or chat. All tickets.

This week, we’ll show you a basic workflow rule to automate client ticket responses and build on everything we’ve discussed so far.

Fundamentals – The Workflow Rule (and Notification Templates, too!)

Autotask describes a Workflow Rule (WFR) as “Configurable rules to automate notifications and data modifications.”  Such a simple description for something so powerful!  Setup properly, WFRs can handle most of the grunt work in Autotask, while freeing your team’s time up.

We’ll be working in Admin > Automation > Workflow Rules > Workflow Rules

There are 4 tabs: one for each workflow – CRM, Contracts, Projects, and Service Desk.

We’ll be in “Service Desk” since that deals with tickets.

If you remember, we’ve been building out the infrastructure to take a ticket via the phone/chat/text or incoming email processing. We did not set anything up to notify the Client the ticket has been received.  We will do that now with a WFR. Below are the step-by-step directions with our recommended defaults. For more information on what each option is, check the Autotask help section.

Creating the Customer Ticket Acknowledgement WFR

  • Select the “Service Desk” Tab

  • Click New

General Tab

  • Name: 1. Customer Acknowledgement

  • Description: Sends acknowledgement to clients for tickets unless they are monitoring alerts.

  • Under Created/Edited: Check “Created by” and choose “Anyone”

  • Under Conditions: Status Equal to New, Source Not equal to Monitoring Alert

Notification Tab

  • Under Recipients choose “Additional Contacts” and “Ticket Contact”

  • Send Email From: Support Email Address

  • Notification Template: Choose the Ticket Creation Notice Template (Click “+” to create and see below if not there)

  • Click “Save & Close”

There you go. When a new ticket comes in via manual entry, email, or Client Portal the Client will automatically get a ticket response.

What if you don’t like the notification text or if you don’t have a Ticket Creation Notice Notification Template?  No problem. As prompted above Click the “+” in the WFR to create or navigate to Admin > Automation > Email Notifications & Surveys > Notification Templates and select the Service Desk tab. Below is our default recommendations.

Customer Ticket Acknowledgement Notification Template

  • Name: 1. Ticket Creation Notice

  • Description: When a ticket is created, send notification to ticket contact telling them ticket was created and informing them of ticket number. Includes company logo and link for Client Portal.

  • Associate with these events: Ticket – Created or Edited

EMAIL MESSAGE

Email Subject - [Ticket: Number]-[Ticket: Title]  - Ticket Opened

Email Format: HTML or Text

Email body: Design this with your colors and font and logo. The text can be whatever you want, but here is some boilerplate. We suggest you send the email from your support address. Note that Autotask doesn’t allow you to show the whole thing in the editor, so the screenshots aren’t lined up.

And there you have it. Clients will now know you received the ticket and stop calling to follow up.

But how to tell them the ticket has been assigned to a Tech?  Perhaps next week….

Summary

You may not believe me, but it is possible to run or manage an MSP without needing daily therapy or working 100 hours a week. In fact, you (yes, even an Owner) 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 almost done going back to the basics to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Your homework for next week is to work with your Service Coordinators to bult out the workflow rules. Next week, we will finish this up. Maybe we will talk about the Client Portal. Or we may talk about the end of the year. Or perhaps, tackle some of your questions? Go over setting up the Client Portal? What do you think? Tech Assignment WFR?  Email us below.

By the way, if you want to learn more there are a few videos on WFRs on our YouTube channel.

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Need Service Coordinator Training? Just want another pair of eyes on your Autotask PSA Software or Datto RMM 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
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Finding Freedom: From All Those Tickets - Automating Ticket Creation