Be a Superhero at Your MSP: Fight Overdue Tickets Batman-Style
Takeaways from this article include:
The (Winding) Path to Improving Service Delivery: Quick Summary
Fire up Autotask & Run Some Live Reports
Why Overdue Tickets are Meaningless
Host a Backlog List of Tickets Killing Party
What if All Those Tickets Still Aren’t Completed?
If you want MORE Time to Actually ENJOY Life, Here’s How…
Hey Autotask Gladiators! Welcome back for another Master Class on how to improve Service Delivery, eliminate Chaos, and (gasp!) increase profitability in your MSP.
I am sure by now that many of you are feeling the fatigue of all this. Maybe you are thinking about just going back to letting your Clients and Techs do whatever they want…as long as a trickle of money comes in.
To many of you, I am sure this “stuff” I teach feels just like the Batman TV show from the 60’s - a new villain every week - and the ones you catch break out of prison and keep coming back.
Don’t despair. This isn’t a TV show. Once we get the Service Delivery Fundamentals in place, you won’t have to revisit these same things over and over. And while we aren’t chasing the Joker and Penguin in our MSP identities, we are helping a lot of people and making the world a better (and safer) place.
To that end, we use a lot of the same tools as Batman and Robin. How so? Keep reading to find out…
Fire Up Autotask & Run Some Live Reports
The Dynamic Duo is known for always having the right tool in their utility belts. And MSPs should have utility belts full as well with RMM (Did you know we speak Datto RMM?), EDR/XDR, SIEM, and everything else we saw 140 vendors hawking recently at DattoCon last week.
The most important tool? Not the Batmobile. When the caped crusaders have a complex problem, they fire up the Bat Computer and run a report. That’s no different than us firing up Autotask and running an Advanced Live Report.
So, if you are still wondering why I have spent much of this MSP growth series on Live Reports, it’s because the information in those reports is what allows the MSP Owner and Service Manager to resolve issues before they happen, forecast appropriately, and have the Zen-like environment every Tech wants to work in.
Why Overdue Tickets are Meaningless
In order to make those reports useful, the data must be accurate, of course. We have talked a lot this year about accurate data being dependent on Techs entering notes and time entries in real-time and Service Coordinators managing the workflow, so I won’t go into it here. But even with all that, Techs can sometimes fudge the numbers. A perfect example of this is your Overdue Tickets report.
Overdue tickets are meaningless because anyone can change the due date, and now they are no longer overdue. The Tech feels better, but the Client is still disappointed, frustrated, and considering leaving the MSP.
The solution? A Backlog List of Tickets (BLT) report provides a list of tickets that from the Client’s point of view are overdue:
Incident Tickets more than 7 days old
Installs/Moves/Adds/Changes (IMACs) more than 30 days old
Great, now I have this Advanced report. But how do I drive the tickets on the list from New to Completion? Here is the secret:
First, determine how many tickets each Tech has in the list.
Less than 5, schedule 4 hours (preferably Thursday or Friday afternoon for them to complete and close the BLTs assigned to them.
If more than 5, go to step 2.
Throw up the Bat Signal and schedule a Thursday afternoon BLT Killing Party.
Thursday afternoon Backlog List of Tickets killing party
The beauty of this strategy is that it starts on Wednesday morning by having the Backlog List of Tickets report automatically generated and sent to everyone on the Service Delivery Team.
From our experience, sometime Wednesday morning, the Techs will look over the list to see which ones they can add their time to and close (often with very thin documentation and poor communication to the Customer), and which ones require some mentoring from other Techs.
For the mentoring help, they’ll most likely give the other Tech a heads up that tomorrow afternoon in the Backlog List of Tickets Killing Party they’ll need to have a conversation around ticket #... That evening the mentoring Tech will take a moment to look at the ticket and figure out what’s going on.
Overnight, the ticket is on both Techs' minds, and at 1 pm on Thursday, there’s a brief, well, thought-out conversation. 15-45 minutes later, the ticket is closed. Easy, right?
What if all those tickets aren’t closed out?
After that, the remaining tickets in the list will be reviewed and worked on by the Primary Resource in the ticket. Because of the concentrated effort, all the tickets will be closed within 45 minutes each.
If all the tickets are not completed, no worries, the report will come out again next week, and the process will be repeated until all tickets are completed. We have Clients that have no tickets more than 14 days old by using this process week over week, and we have other Clients that regularly have no tickets in the BLT report on Wednesday mornings.
The Thursday afternoon Backlog Ticket Killing Party is an all-hands effort, except for the one Tech designated to cover Critical Requests during this time period. No project work and no onsite visits are allowed to be scheduled during this time. These need to be scheduled outside of the Backlog List of Tickets Killing Party.
Yes, even the Service Coordinator puts on their cape and tights and is called into action to follow up on all the Waiting Tickets. And the Service Manager’s #1 responsibility is to hold everyone accountable – no excuses.
Hopefully this makes it clear what to do with the Backlog List of Tickets that keep showing up every week on Wednesday morning or called out in the Monthly Monitoring and Maintaining program. And I hope this also shows that even when the Techs fudge things a bit, with an Autotask Advanced Live Report, we can still be Superheroes.
Want more TIME to enjoy things in life?
We’ve been working all year on the Service Delivery Fundamentals. With these in place, you should not only have happier Techs, raving Clients, and more profit, but more TIME to enjoy things in life (like Batman reruns). If you’re struggling or would just like to save yourself a few years of implementation, email info@agmspcoaching.com for information on our Service Delivery Foundational Improvement program.
👉 Just use “I want to be like Batman” in the subject and we’ll hook you up with a FREE AT review and a custom plan to load up your Service Delivery Utility Belt.
See you next week: Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel.
The elephant in the room:
Who is Advanced Global, and why should we listen to them?
Recently, someone we’ve been in communication with since DattoCon 2018, who was faithfully reading our articles, commented that up until a few months ago, “I really did not know what Advanced Global does.” So here are a few bullet points to let anyone interested know who we are and what we do:
We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
We Help – MSPs thrive
We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure that:
techs know what to work on next
someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
the staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
the Client has a great client experience
profit is maximized
Autotask is being fully leveraged
the historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
the Service Delivery operations can scale
projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
the company can grow
MSPs know what they don’t know
Our Tools:
Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
Advanced Live Reports
Expertise in providing a transformational experience
Note: We are not philosophers; we are doers with 31+ years of Service Delivery experience, bringing real Service Delivery Improvement change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
We start our engagements by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation