My senior engineers are overworked and have become a bottleneck for my service desk.

More of your customers are working remotely, and increasingly have hybrid environments, vendors are changing the way software is delivered and the ever-present threat of ransomware hangs over your head.

Your customers have different tech stacks, from VMWare Workspace One to Intune, and all their AD’s are just that little bit different, with different groups, policies, and the way things are done. It’s no wonder that your level 1’s sometimes struggles with what should be a basic task – creating a user, assigning a license, or giving access to an application.

So they escalate – either informally, or as part of a standard process.

Now your Level 2/3 staff are taking on a range of admin tasks as well as real troubleshooting, and project work for your business and customers. This means they get busy tending to lower-level tasks, when they are paid and relied upon for higher-level issues.
Overloaded senior staff are a real risk to your business, and to your customers.

They make mistakes

The reason the ticket was escalated was because your help desk wasn’t sure how to do it. There must have been a little bit of complexity here.
When a tech is powering through a bunch of admin tasks and they ‘know’ how they are done, mistakes can and usually will happen. We’re all only human. When the mistake is realized by the customer, the ticket comes back!

This delays everything:

• Projects – as time is wasted on administration and fixing mistakes that can be avoidable
• Customer tickets – as they are being escalated and delayed rather than being solved by level 1 support.

Job satisfaction is decreased

Instead of solving interesting issues, or building cool tech, your senior engineers feel like glorified helpdesk staff. Doing things they did years ago, that feels below them.

This puts your business at risk.

We are in a highly competitive market, a dissatisfied engineer can get a new job, likely with a pay bump incredibly easily. Every week there are threads on the MSP subreddit ‘here is what I’m being paid, here is what I do, should I look for a new job?’. The answers are often surprising – especially when taking remote work into account.

Even if they don’t get a new job, people who are dissatisfied are shown to:

• Perform lower quality work
• Be short with customers and colleagues
• Take more sick days or have unexplained absences
• Combine to create a toxic work culture

Longer hours – with more stress and cost

Your senior team is often a hidden revenue engine for your business.

• Onboarding customers quickly and efficiently decreases time to revenue
• Solving a hard problem is often billable, or at least builds customer loyalty
• Building new services drives new revenue streams
• Bringing innovation to the table for cost out or revenue generation
• Making the winning difference in pre-sales conversations

However, they get hamstrung.

If they must deal with escalated admin tasks on a regular basis this consumes time – even if it’s only 1.5 hours a day, with the cost of context switching that is 25% of their time consumed.

If much of their job is documenting because standardization is limited, that adds limited value, and depending on the situation can slow down support, rather than speed it up, due to Level 1’s having to read a screed for every customer, for even simple tasks. Many of the best engineers, don’t find this work interesting, and as a result will avoid doing it at all costs.

If some of the technology stack is owned by them (Citrix Virtual apps and desktops, VMWare Workspace One are common examples) even trivial changes need to be escalated. This slows them down and impacts your customers.

All of this, combined with deadlines to meet:

• Customer projects
• On-boarding projects
• Decommissioning older environments
• Building new services

Can mean they are often working well over 40-hour weeks. Short term this is ok, everyone pulls together in times of need.

But if it extends on and on you run the risk of:

• Employee burnout – they just cannot cope any more
• Leaving for a better perceived environment
• A rotten apple, spreading dissatisfaction to the rest of the business

Atria can help

Atria is a helpdesk portal and provisioning engine that sits across all your customers whether AD, Azure AD or Hybrid and provides a consistent UI and process for your helpdesk.

Behind the scenes the provisioning engine can deal with customer complexities like different technologies, workflow approvals, and configurations.

Onboarding a new customer so that level 1 can start doing standard user administration can take as little as 15 minutes, shortening your time to revenue while giving you time to fully standardize your customers environment.

All of this means that:

• Your senior engineers can focus on projects, and adding value – not administration or basic escalations
• They are happier with more interesting work and less stress, and you are paying less over time
• Your cost to serve has dropped as level one can do more, and your customers receive faster service