Let’s face it, most MSPs are technical folks who enjoy spending time solving customer problems by implementing and maintaining technology-based services. That is why most of us got into this business in the first place. Unfortunately there is a side of the business that many MSPs dread, but is critical to ensure your success. I refer to the activities such as effectively managing the time tracking of your staff, meeting SLAs and most importantly ensuring all your invoicing is accurate and submitted. Building a successful data protection services business requires that you deliver great service and that includes handling all the billing, reporting and incident management.
The good news is there is a great solution to this problem and Vembu has invested significant development resources to ensure complete integration. The answer is Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools like Autotask and Connectwise. Leveraging a PSA tool will allow you to dramatically reduce the time it takes you to do your billing, easily generate professional service reports, improve accuracy and eliminate billing errors, and improve your client’s overall satisfaction.
Leveraging a PSA tool is extremely helpful when building your data protection service because it will enable you to implement a web accessible and sharable calendar and time tracking system. This will allow you to ensure your services staff accurately records their time. Accurate tracking of this information will help you charge your customers correctly and completely and also ensure you’re your staff is performing at the levels you require. That is why it is important to track the work that is billable, work included with monthly support plans or even work that isn’t billable such as attending a training course on how to implement a hybrid data protection solution for your clients.
Once you have all the information in the system, you can now generate reports, invoices and billing. This also allows you to track your monthly performance levels prior to the end of the month so you have time to take corrective action if necessary. You can also easily generate comprehensive service reports for your clients on demand. Once you are accurately tracking all the time, you can better project monthly performance levels before it’s too late to take corrective action. You can also easily and instantly print comprehensive service reports for your clients on demand.
PSA tools will not only help you with your staff, but it will also help your customers. PSA will provide your customer a secure access portal where they can submit and track their own tickets. If you train your customers how to use the portal, they will be more likely to report issues to you in a manner that is less disruptive to your business and you will find out about issues more quickly which will result in faster problem resolution. Your clients will also appreciate the added transparency of knowing what work is being done and how long it took. This will help you meet your SLAs because support incidents won’t get lost and you will be able to track them from inception to resolution more effectively.
Vembu wants to help you build a thriving data protection services business. Leveraging a quality PSA tool like Autotask and Connectwise can help you stay focused on delivering the best possible service because it dramatically simplifies the time tracking and billing aspects of the business. For more information on how Vembu integrates with Autotask, look for an invitation to our joint webinar in the month of October.
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