Self-Service for MSPs – why?
Can you imagine what it would be like if your customers were able to safely make their own changes to users – able to cope with new staff, disable or close accounts, assign licenses – without your help!
Here are 10 reasons for you to consider – How would self-service help your MSP business run more efficiently?
1. Be responsive
Common service tasks can take second place to break/fix issues when the service desk is busy, but if not resolved quickly will lead to customer dissatisfaction and escalations.
Your customers can at times be busy, stretched, or disorganized – this can lead to last minute new user requests. Think – new user starting, no login, HELP!! If you take a few days to turn this around, it’s a few days of lost productivity and disappointment for your customer. Even if you think it’s their fault !!
If your customers are able to create their own users, this will just happen, without bothering you – what’s more – they will be appreciative that they can do this. Double win!
2. Let your customers feel in control
If your customers are small businesses, remember that small business is all about getting things done and getting them done quickly. Changes happen quickly and the last thing a business needs is to be waiting on a third party to get something done. Empowering customers with self-service lets gives control and also lets them take responsibility.
3. Overcoming the labor shortage
Across the world, It’s hard to find good Support staff and Engineers – by enabling your customers to do more support themselves through self-service, pressure is removed from your support teams and you can free up people to focus on key improvement projects.
Real self-service means the load has been removed – it’s not just about distributing the load more efficiently which is often the focus for service desk systems.
4. Be open all hours
By offering a self-service feature, your customers can get what they need on their timescales – if Bob is working late at night and forgot he has a temp starting the next day – he can get the user setup with everything they need, log in to a desktop, Office 365 subscription, email and access to any applications in minutes without needing to wait until the morning to make an urgent phone call.
In small business, Lots of work happens in the evenings or at weekends, deliver your IT services like a SaaS company – always there on demand.
5. Cut out communication errors
Whether by phone call, email, or support ticket – often bits of information are missed, a surname is re-keyed into another system incorrectly. Too much access can be granted, the wrong application is granted, a naming convention is missed.
I’ve seen people fix this problem by creating complex forms, the customer is made to fill the form in and then sign that it’s right. It’s scanned and emailed, then the support team re-key into the various admin systems to create the user.
With a good self-service system, user profiles can be defined with the correct access, textual fields are the responsibility of the customer and any mistakes can also be self-corrected. Reduce anger, gripes and bickering!
Remove the opportunity for broken communication and mistakes disappear!
6. Reduce inbound tickets
A key underlying reason for implementing self-service is to remove the load on your service desk. If done well, the number of inbound tickets should be dramatically reduced. This means that your service desk can be more responsive to real problems.
Find out how ThriveWell Tech empowered their customers HR teams to reduce support load
7. Build happier teams
Move/adds/changes are fairly tedious jobs for some technical personalities. Sometimes these have to be done by senior staff, who in most cases will have more valuable tasks in their backlog.
With a good customer self-service IT portal, the most boring jobs are removed from your engineering teams and also from your support staff. This frees people up up to do more of the things they love. Less escalations and less rework means less stress and less finger-pointing. Net result, smoother, happier teams.
8. Differentiate from other MSPs
Self-service to most MSPs is the ability for people to log a ticket through a support portal, or be able to view an invoice online.
MSPs that have built a strong self-service capability are genuinely differentiated, it helps close deals with larger customers. Once customers are onboard – they won’t want to leave.
9. Up-Sell services
By regularly using a self-service portal, you are able to present additional services to your customers. This combined with automated provisioning makes it easier for you to market, onboard, and sell more services to your existing customer base. Increase your ARPU and decrease your cost of delivery.
10. Scale up and increase shareholder value
Adding Self-service to your MSP business, drives down the operating overheads within your business, it allows you to scale up in a non-linear manner. This is a fundamental means of increasing the value of your MSP business. This is the difference between your business being a professional services company or a recurring revenue generation machine – the difference can be a 10x increase in shareholder value.
Good automation is rare, the MSPs achieving the highest valuations are serious about proving a scalable model which is not dependent on selling people by the hour – self-service is a key component and will also make your MSP business stand out – it’s a good selling point.
Want to know more about Atria?
Atria is a portal for MSPs, designed to make management of end-users and their IT services easy for the helpdesk, engineers and customers. Self-service is a key feature enabled by Atria and it’s proven to increase customer and MSP productivity.
Contact us to discuss your use cases and how Atria can help you to better support your customers.
