Self-Service Identity Management For MSPs

What is Self-Service identity management

Self-Service Identity Management in an MSP context, means enabling your customers to take responsibility for creating, changing, and removing user account details. Identity management is usually also associated with granting access to information via different business applications.

Self-service does not mean that you are losing control, if implemented correctly it can dramatically improve your operations and your customer satisfaction levels, while actually improving quality and removing risks from your business.

Customers are beginning to expect Self-Service

Expectations are changing, Customers are now more used to self-service of administration via the plethora of SaaS applications they use every day.

Traditional IT service has administration functions detached and isolated through complex administration tools requiring knowledge for user management, access control and the standard configuration items needed for everyday users to access the services they need to operate.

The world of SaaS applications has changed expectations and often putting end-users in control of purchasing and activating systems independently of IT teams. Adding a user to a SaaS application is considerably easier than getting a new user added via most MSPs.

LarThe big difference in experience is self-service; the customer can administer the system themselves and ensure the user is up and running.
In the traditional IT world, there is always waiting and queuing, and work is handled either by:

(a) Expensive highly skilled IT staff re-keying information into a system – a job that detracts them from their core work, or

(b) Under skilled staff, logging into highly privileged systems such as Active Directory, with the ability to accidentally make a catastrophic mistake.

This situation is not good to the Customer or to the MSP business. This is low value repetitive work which is important, but generally results in a poor customer experience, while consuming valuable time.

The realm of self-service requires a different mind-set, one which is focused on helping the customer by making IT processes easier, rather than being focused on perceived value of basic IT administration.

MSPs who operate a largely manual IT process-based business struggle to scale past a certain point. Increased customers, complexity and more users to support need more service desk staff; profitability is likely to decrease as communication, process and management overheads take their toll on productivity.

It is hence no surprise that many Managed Services Providers grow for many years without the desired boost to bottom line profit. Growth can become a painful struggle with little benefit delivered to shareholders.

Following the leaders

Larger MSPs today are working hard to empower their customers to do more via self-service portals. The Business leaders of these organizations turn to automation to drive improved profitability, but also to deliver better customer service and differentiation from competitors. They also do this to reduce the risks involved in managing complex infrastructure at scale, managing larger teams of people with different skill levels, and at times enabling segregation of duties and safer offshoring of staff.

Many larger MSPs have teams of developers building custom automation portals to enable a level of self-service in an attempt to reduce the dependency on people and to allow the business to scale up efficiently. In fundamental terms, this means achieving a better ratio of supported users to MSP employees.

The good news is that systems like Atria that provide self-service are an affordable alternative to running a development team and also scale down to smaller MSPs. Starting with an automation strategy when you are small is a really good idea as it makes the incremental addition of each customer so much easier.

Why is it hard to scale an MSP business ?

Using the following example, of a fictitious ambitious MSP – they support 2,300 users and handle approx. 1400 support cases per month from their customer base.

They plan to double in size – In order to support twice the number of customers they may :

• Require the introduction of two leaders/managers to co-ordinate the increased staff and to keep team size small
• Plan to at least a doubling of support staff.
• Expect to decrease efficiency as communication and process adapt to the larger organization

Per-user margin will likely drop as a result of the doubling of size and in line with the Users Supported/Engineer.  As CEO of this company, I now have many more people to look after, motivate and worry about, but my profitability and business value may have dropped as a result of my increased size (without increased profitability)

 Keeping team sizes as small as possible is a key to productivity and performance, a great deal of research proves that larger teams are less productive.  Although the article Is the Size of Your Dev Team Harming Your Productivity? relates to software development teams, the key elements needed for high performance apply to any business team.  

Scaling with Self-Service

By self-service, I don’t mean users being able to create their own support tickets.  We want our customers to be empowered to make their own changes to user Identity, fix their own mistakes, configure their own access.  Using automation, we can be assured that the work is done consistently following conventions and there are less likely to be impacting mistakes.

Our assumption in this example is that approx. 25% of tickets can be eliminated using self-service identity management and provisioning.  (Consider your own support cases, how many of your cases could be replaced by self-service?)

With this model, we’ve doubled our revenue, but have done it without doubling our overheads.  This is how every MSP wants to scale.

My Customers wont use self-service, they prefer to call us.

I hear you cry, “but we deliver personal service” – and “My customers want to call us”.  It is possible that your customers are attuned to a phone or email based service.  I can assure you that for many, once they have the ability and confidence to self-manage their IT services safely, they will never want to go back.

In my experience of supporting hundreds of small businesses as an MSP, I found that some personalities (generally older business owners) preferred the phone or email to request IT changes.  They wanted responsiveness (done ASAP), but didn’t want the bother of learning another thing (i.e. the self-service portal to make their own IT changes.

For these businesses, they called the help desk, and we made it easy for the helpdesk to make the changes using the same automation.  We also worked with them to empower the right individual in the organization to use the self-service portal.  The aim – delivering them better service, getting things done right the first time, freeing up our limited team to do more important project work.

We charge by the hour, self-service identity would break our model

Every writer on this subject is likely to recommend moving to a recurring price per user, or price per endpoint managed model for delivering your services.   That’s a different topic.

The great thing about having many customers is that you can look at your costs and work them into a different model.  The main thing is to know where your costs are, then make sure your pricing model maintains a margin.

Reducing the pain of mistakes

One of the hardest things about growing an MSP is the snowball effects of mistakes.  When there are a few of you, it’s easier to stay on top of everything, be there to steer the ship, oversee people.  As more people are added, problems creep in, mistakes get made and customer facing issues result.  This churn causes a cycle of problems.  One mistake can steer a bunch of people off task, and ultimately result in other customers being impacted or more firefighting.

Using a self-service platform relieves some of the pressure, it allows people to perform tasks with guardrails in place – i.e. the new support guy without much experience doesn’t need to be logging onto servers in his first ever job.

Self-Service Identity Management is a differentiator for MSPs

Offering self-service as part of your solution to prospective customers could win you the deal.  I have found that particularly with organizations of 50+ people, or companies where there are frequent staff changes (healthcare, aged care, seasonal work) the self-service capability is a stand-out feature.  Even if this is not appreciated at sales-time, it will be appreciated throughout the relationship from the start – where on-boarding will be faster and less error prone.

Conclusion

1. People tolerate ticket-based support, but would prefer it to be the exception
2. MSP is a people based business, in order to scale more efficiently alternatives need to be found to improve efficiency.
3. Once a Self-service system is in place, many IT administrative tasks can be handled by competent administrative staff within a customer.
4. Customers prefer self-service because they can achieve their tasks in their own timescales without being dependent on an external party.
5. MSP businesses with self-service automation return higher profits and are more valuable. This is simply because they are able to support more users with less staff.