Whoa! Tame the Wild Wild West at Your MSP With These Strategies
Imagine this: You are sitting at a restaurant with your lovely significant other, hoping for an even lovelier evening. But…you’re dreading the experience. You had no idea when the waiter would take your order - and now you’re praying to see your food before closing time.
The last time you were here, you gave your order…then didn’t see the waiter again for a long, long time. When they did deliver the order, there was no conversation, no check back to see if everything was OK, nothing. When the bill came, it was a number on a piece of paper with no reference to what was even served.
Sure, the food was good, but the Customer Service was pretty damn pathetic. How would you be feeling? Would you be disrupting the other waiters asking where your order/waiter was at? Would you flag your waiter down and ask them to move your order up the Cook’s list? See another waiter doing their job and try and place a 2nd order with them? Would you tell the person in charge? Or would you walk out never to talk about going to that restaurant again, while at the same time making sure all your friends never went to that restaurant either?
MSPs are complaining loudly. Can you relate?
And yet MSPs constantly complain that:
No one knows what the Techs are working on at any one moment
Documentation is poor or non-existent
Customers are very noisy, wanting to jump the line, or creating duplicate tickets
Your gut says the Time Entries were done late Sunday night or early Monday morning, if at all…
Why do we allow the chaos to reign? Chaos that is caused by Techs providing poor Customer Service day in and day out.
My experience says this is because we do not have an easy, reliable Time Entry monitoring tool. If we did, we could have positive, collaborative, one-on-one coaching sessions with the Techs, or at least good HR documentation for a day off, leading to termination if performance does not improve.
The best thing about having a reliable Time Entry monitoring tool
With a Time Entry monitoring tool, you are no longer pointing fingers at your best Tech. It is the tool that is throwing them under the bus. You are just there to help them plead their case and make some performance adjustments for their own good.
We know the downside of receiving poor Customer Service at a restaurant. We bad-mouth them, never go there again, and monitor them out of the corner of our eye to see how long they stay in business. But for an MSP, the negative impacts of poor Customer Service are a bit more complicated. Yes, 80% of Clients leaving an MSP is due to poor Customer Service, but with growth at 20% or more, this is not a major pain point.
Major Pain Points Caused by Poor Customer Service for MSPs
Here is a list of major pain points due to poor Customer Service for MSPs:
Noisy Clients causing disruptions, wasted time, and rework
Inefficient operation due to thin or missing documentation
Writing off billable work due to inaccurate or missing Time Entries
Additional work (80 hours) to properly onboard a replacement Client
Wasted time tracking down:
Who is working on what
What was done during the last engagement
Where is the Client’s request in the process of New to Complete
Note: it is imperative that we impress upon the Techs that documentation, communication, and accurate time entries are:
Part of the engagement
What the Client is paying for
Expected - each and every time
And underperformance in this area will lead to discipline, including days off; if performance does not meet expectations, termination may follow.
FYI: The Time Entry Performance Expectation is not harsh.
It might surprise you that the expectation is two hours or less. It might also surprise you that Field Techs have an easier time meeting this expectation than Remote Desktop Support Professionals.
I would wager that you are well aware of the problems caused by poor Customer Service. They are common conversations around Ask the Expert, Peer Groups, Conferences, and even blog articles. Based on those conversations, it seems that an easy solution to this problem eludes much of the IT Industry, and I would guess, your MSP and yourself. This does not need to be the case as an easy solution is readily available.
When the MSP I was working for faced this dilemma, the President suggested the Company book club read Who Will Do What by When, by Tom and Birgit Zacher Hanson. This is a book about a failing manager named Jake who learns to hold co-workers accountable. The President of the MSP’s premise was that if we held ourselves accountable, then we could hold the Clients accountable to pay their bills, and the volume of our write-offs would go down. In hindsight, if we improve our level of professionalism, Customers would pay their bills on time without pushback.
Step #1: Change the MSPs Culture
As you can see, the first step is to change the culture and communicate loudly that documentation, communication, and time entries are part of the engagement.
But that does not solve the problem. It may be part of the culture, or you may wish it to be part of the culture - but how do you monitor performance and coach the few Techs that believe they are more important than the rest of the Team?
You know them: The ones that don’t realize that if they provided good documentation, their project work would be less disrupted. The ones that just might see those disruptions they complain about so much as actually an adrenaline rush and confirmation that they are needed, and the MSP cannot do without them. Unfortunately, the opposite is true if they were replaced by a Tech/Engineer who did embrace proper documentation before disengagement; the MSP would be more profitable – everyone is expendable, including ME {feel free to put your name here}.
The Staggering Costs of Replacing a Managed Service Client
So, what is the cost of not addressing the lack of Delivering Superior Service to the Clients? Let’s look at the numbers:
The cost of replacing a Managed Service Client is 80 hours of work, 40 hours billable, 40 hours of non-billable work. The 40 hours of billable hours is valued at $6,000 per onboarding. Based on industry churn data, 4% of your Managed Service Clients are at risk, or $240 (4% of $6,000) per Managed Service Client. If you have 100 Managed Service Clients, that comes down to $24,000.00 times the exchange rate if you live outside of the US.
If there was a reliable time entry monitoring tool, then everyone could be easily held accountable. Everyone would see the performance, who was embracing Superior Service to the Clients, and who was bucking the system. The Management Team would then see if they have a Culture problem (very few or no one is acting like a professional), or a few Individuals (a few stragglers not getting with the program).
Culture Problem at the MSP…or a Few Stragglers?
If it is a culture problem, then top-down communication, lunch & learns, open discussion about the problem and the cost to both the Client and Company, and one-on-one coaching sessions starting with the worst offender, will start the process of turning the ship. Note: it may take a termination for the rest of the Team to take the Management statements seriously. It is a shame, but sometimes that is what it takes to change a culture.
If it is a few stragglers, then a one-on-one coaching approach is more beneficial, including adding their Engagement/Disengagement performance to a 90-day performance improvement program. My experience is that when it comes to a 90-day performance improvement program, if performance does not start improving in the first 30 days, with significant improvement in 60 days, a resignation will be tendered before the 90 days is up. If not, rest assured you have done your best, treated the individual with dignity, and helped them make the decision they could not bring themselves to make.
The Solution: Our Advanced Real-Time Time Entry report
Over the years, we have written about many tools that can be used to hold the Techs accountable such as:
Kim Drumm’s Team Hours Worked This Week widget
Document Detention
Culture Statements
One-on-One coaching conversations
But none has been more effective in providing a Reliable Time Entry Monitoring than Advanced Global’s Advanced Real-Time Time Entry report. If you are struggling to hold the Techs accountable, you have three options.
Which one of these will you choose?
Do nothing and continue costing the Company $24,000 per year per 100 Managed Service Clients.
Write your own Real-Time Time Entry report, which from experience, unless you already know how to write Live Reports, will take someone 3 months to write.
Purchase Advanced Global’s “Reliable Time Entry Monitoring” report for $450.00 CLICK HERE.**
After all, what do you have to lose? Except for the $24,000 per year per 100 Managed Service Clients, it is costing you in labor to onboard a replacement Managed Service Client, that you could have avoided needing in the first place.
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:
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 by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation
Steve & Co