Are you struggling to hire enough Level 1 Techs and facing staffing issues?

The market right now is incredibly competitive and causing staffing issues. It has never been harder to get people to show up for interviews, pay demands have never been higher, and often time the skill level you get just isn’t quite there.

Yet your customers still expect the same level of service for the same cost. It’s a hard but not unsolvable problem.

So what do you do? Hire more expensive people?

Yes, this is a reasonable option.

It does mean a hit to your bottom line, that depending on customer contracts you can’t pass along just yet. You are also put in the position of potentially having to offer all of your staff a raise to keep pay scales in order.

On the positive side, you can expect a little more out of the person you hire – either more skills and certifications or perhaps starting to step into Level 2 territory.

Hire lower-skilled people?

Yes, this is also a reasonable option.

It will involve having your level 2 techs needing to support them more, which can breed dissatisfaction. Customer issues can take longer to resolve, and often time simpler tasks will have to be escalated.

Going this path you can also hire grads, and train them up. Great for the medium to long term, but doesn’t help that much with today’s workload though.

Automate everything?

Yes, this is also a reasonable option.

By figuring out your most common helpdesk problems and scripting/automating the resolutions you can lower the time and skill level required to solve problems and can relieve your staffing issues. This does require an investment of time and process for your more senior guys.

Automating common tasks like user onboarding and offboarding, license assignments, password resets and access control your Level 1’s can be incredibly efficient.

Atria helps you do all 3 of the above, in a way that makes sense

Atria is a Control Panel that sits across all of your customers’ AD and Azure AD environments.

With a simple UI, common tasks like users onboarding and offboarding, license assignment, and password resets can be done easily.

Using Atria means you can help your Level 1 resourcing issues which means:

Your Level 1’s can do more faster.

Atria is a single place to make common changes, a single login means no more switching between PSA to Documentation tool to AD Servers to PartnerCentre.

Just compare these two workflows for putting a user in an AD group:

You can hire customer service rather than technical support

For a range of process-driven tickets like user management Atria provides a simple and consistent UI across all of your customers. No technical knowledge is needed.

This means you can hire an excellent customer service person who can handle ádmin’ style tickets, while your more technical team members deal with fixes, troubleshooting, and higher-level projects.

Watch our video on managing a user, and how easy it is – whether Azure AD, AD or Hybrid.

Encourage your customers to do some self-service

Atria lets your customers self-service a range of user admin tasks – onboarding, offboarding, name changes, password resets, and more.

For your customers that have HR Departments, Office Managers or even internal IT support people Atria can be a boon. They don’t need to log a ticket, they can ‘fill in the form in Atria’ and the request is automatically actioned.

Learn more about how Atria enables self-service and co-managed IT.

These three scenarios combined mean you can:

• Slow down hiring – you need fewer people for the same amount of customers relieving staffing issues.
• Hire cheaper staff for customer service, and get your technical team doing what they do best.
• Train your customers to be more self-sufficient, leading to increased satisfaction