Best practices can make wonders for your business, from scaling to improving certain processes. In end, we all want our MSPs to thrive and prosper, and in most cases it is only possible when doing your best. Curious about what benefits the best practices of running an MSP can bring to your business? Don’t wait, read the article, and apply our tips!
Every managed service provider should be using the best practices to run their business successfully. Doing so will bring significant benefits to your organization, like keeping your star technicians happy, preventing your help desk from getting out of control, and setting yourself apart from the competition.
The main benefits of implementing best practices into your MSP
- Improved company structure
- Better service for clients
- Better work environment for the staff members
- Improved documentation and ticket notes
- Increase in staff efficiency
- Saving money
- Delegation that creates automatization
- More effective remote management
- Ease of selling the business
We have worked with many MSPs around the world. Plenty of them don’t understand the value of what are considered the best ways of running managed services.
How MSPs Benefit from Best Practices
If you want to scale your MSP or eventually sell your company, you need to know and apply the best practices for managed service providers. In this article, we dive into the worst practices you might be currently following and how to improve them.
Improve Your MSP’s Company Structure
How you structure your MSP operations is the difference between a chaotic help desk that stresses everyone out versus a seamlessly scaling managed service.
We are so adamant about improving this that we have created a list of MSP best practices to give you clear guidance on all the elements that we’ve noticed the best MSPs do.
The main benefit an MSP gets after implementing these best practices is that they establish a more robust and organized company structure.
For example, implementing a communication policy for your managed service will help you reduce the disorganization of stored information. If all the details about an issue are entered into a ticketing system with email notifications, instead of bits of info being scattered across days-old Microsoft Teams conversations and long email threads, you will instantly have better communication. The flow of information will be much better in your company.
Moreover, an MSP’s structure will improve significantly when the management, service desk coordinators and technicians all work together in accordance with a foolproof plan.
The following elements should be implemented in your MSP’s structure:
- Team members follow the best practices for ticket notes (download our free ticket note writing guide!)
- Create a defined recruiting and onboarding process
- Utilize a screening and verifying process for candidates
- Define your company’s culture and values
Establishing a well-functioning structure will instantly bring better results to your clients, and clear rules in tickets will allow technicians to know:
- How tickets are being created
- Who is responsible for which ticket
- How tickets are escalated
After implementing the best practices, operations will improve because your MSP staff members will be committed to doing the following:
- Being accountable for completing work assigned to them
- Knowing the help desk workflow like the back of their hand
- Having clarity on how current projects are being run
- Knowing how they can help clients in the best possible way
An MSP needs to constantly implement best practices as well as improved systems. This will allow your employees to be more self-sufficient within a structure that swiftly tackles your clients’ issues.
Clients Will Receive a Better Service with MSP Best Practices in Place
Another positive of following the best practices for managed service providers is an improved experience for your clients. This element is crucial for your business because the more satisfied your customers are, the more your business will benefit from word-of-mouth and referrals.
With an improved structure, your clients can have a better understanding of:
- what happens when they email in a ticket
- what happens if they use your portal to submit a ticket
- what happens when they call in
- why they shouldn’t call every time and email instead
- what to do in case of an emergency
- expectations about all of the above
Sometimes customers think that the only way to get good service from an MSP is to call and demand to speak to a technician. This creates a dynamic where you are the mercy of your customers’ whims and they dictate your schedule.
To avoid such situations, you might want to improve the consistency of your service through other channels and set adequate expectations with clients.
You should make guarantees about your response time and be consistent. You must also add more organization to your help desk where technicians can focus while working on one ticket or one project at a time.
Making a few structural changes like this will prevent a chaotic environment where tickets get lost and the phone is endlessly ringing off the hook.
MSP Best Practices Allow Staff to Enjoy Their Work Environment
The third benefit of using the best practices in your MSP is that they create an amazing environment for your staff. Employees are everything for a business, hence you must take good care of them if you want to hold on to them.
This point is very important because if staff members don’t like where they work, the chance of them quitting is quite high. You want to reduce turnover as much as possible. You need to keep happy workers who have the potential to be moved up in your organization or be mentored.
Unfortunately, many people burn out while working at MSPs, especially the level-one help desk technicians. It shouldn’t be a surprise as they receive many calls from demanding and angry clients.
The absence of structure and consistency is what makes clients agitated, which pushes your best talent away. But you must remember that there is no shortage of jobs in the tech industry. Plenty of unhappy techs can quit and find a more peaceful place to work without feeling under enormous pressure.
Ideally, all MSPs should give their team members the ability to evolve as professionals and get a set of social, organizational, and technical skills in one place.
Therefore, you should create a great place to work for your current and future team members. In order to make your organization a better place to work, you need to implement those best practices and be fully willing to learn and constantly improve your business so that you can scale it further.
Easy Remote Management is Facilitated by the Best Practices for MSPs
When you implement the best practices for managed service providers, you are more able to sit back and remotely manage your business effectively.
When you improve structure and organization, running the business gets so much easier. You don’t have to micromanage as much and be on standby for every interaction.
When techs write ticket notes on exactly what they did, this will be sufficiently documented in your ticketing system. This will allow you to easily follow the happenings of your MSP remotely, or even abroad if you wish.
We highly suggest minimizing the need to rely on chat and phone communication. MSPs often have hundreds of emails in their inbox due to a lack of proper structure in their organization.
Staff must be trained on the structure and system that the company is using. They also must know what their main responsibilities and goals are.
The more streamlined and structured your organization is, the more freedom you will have as a business owner. Whether freedom for you is working from a beach or staying home with your family, you can manage your business from anywhere by improving and strengthening:
- documentation
- key metrics
- service reports
- the service desk workflow
Stepping Back and Selling Your MSP Business
The last consequence, and by far the biggest benefit of implementing best practices into your MSP, is the ease of selling the business. Yes, finally you can take a step back from your company, and eventually sell it.
This could never happen if the MSP owner is still managing the company in an inefficient way without implementing the best practices. Once you have achieved great KPIs with your MSP and have been running a company for a few years, you might eventually want to sell it.
In fact, we have talked to some fresh MSP owners, and they do prefer to buy businesses that have reached a particular level of maturity. This allows the acquirer to quickly bring on board a company they are interested in and integrate its existing staff.
Nonetheless, some MSP acquisition companies have a “tear it all down” mentality. Acquirers simply implement the system they were previously using. In that case, all your hard work will be ignored.
Therefore, MSP owners should build a stable and transferable system, so that taking over the company can actually adopt it. It will provide stability and smooth transition to your clients and staff members.
This stability in the MSP space can be reached only after implementing some of the best practices and avoiding the worst practices. Yet, IT is a fairly unregulated industry, where people do what they want and how they want. Hence, many MSPs in the industry are following the wrong path.
How To Implement The Best Practices
We believe in a constantly evolving company structure. In the IT business world, it becomes more possible to streamline more things, and create systems to help companies scale and grow.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help in figuring out what the best practices are and what mistakes you might be making. If you’re not implementing some of them you should know that other people have been through and done that. Only after making the change will you be able to scale your MSP.
With the new structure, MSP owners will be able to integrate more people into the organization, bring on more clients, and have a clear vision.
During the implementation of the best practices you will learn:
- how to scope out the deals
- write the right contracts
- onboard the MSP
- educate the help desk on how to support users
An MSP can expect the following results:
- staff members are leaving good ticket notes
- a dispatcher is holding the technicians accountable
- clients are highly satisfied with the service
- staff members are enjoying their jobs
We hope you enjoyed the information we have provided and are ready to implement the best practices. If you’re an MSP looking for premium outsourced MSP staffing services we at Support Adventure got your back! Reach out to us to become a client.
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