Why Your MSP Needs a Powerful Bi-Partisan Presence to Soar

service coordinator duties explained

Bi-partisan. That’s a hot button word these days. You’re probably wondering, “What does it have to do with my MSP?”Well, since you asked…To thrive & grow in today’s rapidly evolving, ever-competitive market, your MSP greatly benefits from having a powerful, bi-partisan presence that has everyone’s best interests in mind. Who? Enter: TheService Coordinator. We have laid out the daily duties of a Service Coordinator by following the 3 recommended Service Coordinator Dashboards. These 3 dashboards set the Service Coordinator up for success when it comes to managing all open tickets and driving them all from “New to Completion.”But is that all a Service Coordinator does? Not in the least!

The Many Roles of a Service Coordinator, broken down...

Chief Customer Advocate:

Beyond the Dashboards, Service Coordinators are the Customer advocate within the Company. They should be the Single Point of Contact for the Customer because the Account Manager (in a normal non-pandemic environment) is out of the office most of the time meeting other Customers Face-to-Face. It is not good Customer Service to have your Clients contacting the Techs directly.As the MSP scales, it is harder and harder to navigate who does what in the Company.But if the Customer gets in contact with the Service Coordinator, they can get them to the right person - or better yet, give them the information they are seeking.  More importantly, the Service Coordinator can provide and set the stage for the same Customer experience, no matter who engages.

Bi-Partisan Presence (can you say that in an election year?)

The Service Coordinator is also neutral in their agendas (unlike any US News Bureau). While they work for the Company and have a general interest in seeing the Company survive, they are also very close to the Customer and want the Customer to be well served. And when you think about it, these two go hand in hand. Service Coordinators are also part of the Service Delivery Team, so they get very close to the Techs and they see what the Techs go through every day. Theirheart then goes out to the Techs (I know, as I have sat in this seat) and they become very protective - not only of the Techs’ schedules but the Techs themselves. At the end of the day, the Service Coordinator is in the best place to be Judge, Jury, and Executioner (Execution, of course, referring to driving the tickets from New to Complete).

Intuitive Churn Monitor:

A good, well-seasoned Service Coordinator will also know the temperature of the Customer and Techs. They can tell in advance when either one of them is getting ready to leave. Service Coordinators also feel powerless to do anything about it. They can see it coming, but the reasoneither a Customer or a Tech is leaving is because things have happened that the Service Coordinator could not have done anything about, or they would have.

Savvy Autotask System Administrator:

This may surprise you, but we highly recommend the Service Coordinator to also be one of the (no more than three) Autotask System Administrators. While they may and/or should not be much help on the Sales, Marketing or Accounting side of the Autotask software, they know the Service Delivery operational side. I want to say, better than anyone else, but it is in fact, different. They may not be able to understand the philosophy of why something is the way it is or understand what or why a procedure is one way or the other, but they do understand how Service Delivery operates. In other words, how the money is made. And while they may not be the best person to draft and decide on what procedures are needed, they are the ones that understand how to implement new procedures, manage all procedures (along with all tickets and all workflows), and they will be the first to know if a procedure is working or not. The bottom line: they know how to “Get’r Done.”  Therefore, they should be empowered to make changes in the software that need to be made for the operation to be more efficient, or for the data to provide meaningful information. 

Capable Autotask Live Report Writer:

Someone in-house also needs to know how to write Live Reports. Outside of the fact that they are very busy, and this is a full-time job, a Service Coordinator is in a great place to have someone trained to write Live Reports. They know what information is needed, as well as the Service Manager, Ops Manager, and Owner (even if these are all the same person). As a System Administrator, they will know how Autotask needs to be configured to get the data/information required. One of the biggest comments we hear about the Autotask software is that it does not provide the information needed to make good business decisions. The reason for that is the underlying configurations do not provide the data, and no one in-house knows how to write the reports to turn the data into GOLD (I mean information). No one is better positioned to provide the information than a Service Coordinator who is equipped to be an Autotask System Administrator and Autotask Live Report writer.

How do we know? We have been there. With 22+ years of Autotask System Administrator and Autotask Live Report writing experience, we are the best in the business.