Tickets Should Not Have Birthdays! (And you should watch football)
Welcome back, Autotask Gladiators! I know you have choices in free resources to improve your MSP’s Service Delivery, Profits, and Tech happiness, so thank you for choosing to come back week after week.
Here’s what we’re talking about today:
The mythical unicorn: work/life balance
Time to look at Open Tickets
Tackle those Waiting Tickets
Advice for handling the 4 types of Waiting Tickets
Need a touchdown? Let us help!
Seriously, I know it’s not always easy to work IN an MSP day after day and then also find time (and mental capacity) to work ON the MSP. Especially when you could be watching a billion hours a week of college and pro football, Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and six hours a week of On Patrol: Live.
That Mythical Unicorn: Work-Life Balance
How do you get a handle on your life and the MSP so that you have happy Clients, smiling Techs, and that mythical unicorn called work-life balance?
A great place to start is by looking at the open tickets. In last week’s article, we showed how to eliminate wasted time by automating what the Techs worked on most. We did this with the “Ready to Engage” widget. Now that the Techs are smoothly working through tickets in SLA order, we need to address managing the actual tickets queues.
Likely, the volume of open tickets is so overwhelming that by the time we finish an open ticket review, there is no time to work on the tickets!
Eeek…How do we get off this hamster wheel?
One easy way, of course, is to engage Advanced Global, let us do a free review and then work with your Team to resolve. But just like many people clean their house BEFORE calling the cleaning company, most of you will want to clean things up before engaging us. How many of you are thinking right now that things are so bad, and you’re afraid Coach Carol is going to find all the tickets that are over a year old?
Back to the open tickets…Where do you start? With most MSPs, the majority of the open tickets are waiting –
Waiting Customer
Waiting Parts
Waiting Vendor
On Hold
We do our best, of course, by poking the Client or Vendor every few days, but that feels like we are just “kicking the can down the street.” We want to address all these tickets, but how?
How to Address Waiting Tickets:
#1- Waiting Customer Solution:
Put in a “3 Strikes & You’re Out” rule. Create a Workflow Rule (WFR) that provides the Client with two reminders after the first notification goes out. The template for this is similar but lets the Client know that if the MSP does not hear back from them, the MSP is going to assume the problem no longer exists and close out the request/ticket.
Now, just automatically closing a ticket is cold - and does not provide a positive Client experience. So, on the last notice, the notification provides information to the Client user on how to engage now to get the issue resolved (or how to re-engage down the road if they are just too busy right now).
The notification also goes to the Owner, Account Manager, or Service Coordinator, who calls the Client.
In that conversation (voice mail is fine and maybe even preferred), the following script is read, which you can easily personalize to match your own “voice”:
The MSP is doing their best, but they need the Client to help them help them.
Because the MSP has not heard back from the Client as needed to help them, they assume the issue no longer exists.
If the Client does not respond by the End of Business day, the MSP is going to close the ticket.
If the Client still needs the engagement, please let us know ASAP.
The MSP then sets the status to Autoclose at the end of the day, and voilà, no 1st birthday. (we joke about it, but tickets do have birthdays and some Service Coordinators will bring in a cake to celebrate closing that ticket).
#2- Waiting Parts:
Within an hour or two after placing an order, the Estimated Time of Arrival/delivery date should be known. Once the ETA is known, the engagement can be scheduled for a day or two after the ETA. The reason for skipping a day between ETA and schedule is to give time for delays and shop work before deployment.
At the MSP I used to work for, the Shop work was usually done the same day the parts arrived. Most of the time, the parts arrived on time, but it still took us a day to gather up all the parts on the work order and to get them in the Tech’s hands, so they had everything they needed before leaving the building. As a side note, when a Tech did walk out the door without everything, we found sending the missing parts via courier cheaper than dispatching a Tech.
Once the ticket is scheduled, it will no longer be “Waiting” and no longer in the Waiting Tickets widget.
#3- Waiting Vendor:
If a vendor does not respond to your support ticket within 2 days, there is a good chance it is at the bottom of their list, and maybe heading to its first birthday.
Rather than putting the ticket as Waiting Vendor, a better process is to have the Service Coordinator contact the Vendor and say, “Our Tech needs to talk to Your Tech,” when is a good time for your Tech to talk, and I will schedule our Tech to be available? Once the ticket is scheduled, it will no longer be “Waiting” and no longer in the Waiting Tickets widget.
#4- On Hold:
On Hold tickets are best managed by removing them from the Tech’s dashboard and having a WFR to return them to “Ready to Engage” when the due date is reached.
While Advanced Global coaches a lot of MSPs on Autotask PSAutomations, we do not trust automation to return the ticket to the Ready to Engage widget as expected.
For this reason, we give the Service Coordinator an overview of the On Hold tickets via a Dashboard Widget. This is especially useful because the automated mechanism is not going to return the past due tickets to the Ready to Engage widget.
The good news is that this is pretty easy to fix. All the Service Coordinator has to do is set the Due Date to sometime in the future. We recommend the next Thursday afternoon, because things seem to slow down on Thursday afternoons and Fridays, giving the Tech the best chance to reset the Due Date to one that is more accurate.
Hopefully, that all makes sense, and you were able to follow the plays I used to get around the blockers and into the endzone.
Wishing you had time to watch your favorite dancing, cooking, or sports program – but feeling stuck (or need the Service Delivery Forecast report)? We’ve got your back! Email me at info@AGMSPCoaching.com and put “I need a Touchdown” in the subject line, and I’ll have someone reach out right away.
Don’t waste time by trying to clean up the house first. We’ve seen it all. We can help. (If nothing else, ask us how you can participate in our FREE “Ask the Experts” weekly call.)
See you next week!
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