Gaidar Magdanurov, President of Acronis
Many years ago, early in my career, I was an “on-call IT guy,” or, as we would call this job in today’s terms, a small break-fix MSP — as I had to regularly employ the services of subcontractors to help with network and hardware installation and had to manage the complete IT projects for customers.
It was extremely frustrating to give up business due to a lack of capacity to support growing customers’ needs and the inability to onboard and manage more customers. Today, the MSP world is even more competitive, as more efficient MSPs support customers outside of the usual three- to four-hour driving distance, as remote work became a new norm after the pandemic.
Your services are up against other MSPs with similar offerings at lower prices, and all too often, customers go after the cheapest offer.
At some point, you may feel like reducing prices will help you to compete, but it will do more harm than good, as price wars lead to decreasing margins for all players on the market and an inability to sustain the business.
Thus, productivity is essential to staying competitive, and here’s why: it boils down to achieving a high level of efficiency that enables you to provide higher quality service and support more customers without adding more people to your team.
To improve productivity, you need to measure it first. You can use multiple metrics, including the number of endpoints, tickets, clients or interactions per technician; the time to first response or resolution; and service-level agreement (SLA) compliance. Yet, many service providers do not have these metrics well defined or lack processes to track them accurately.
What hinders productivity?
Once you benchmark your technicians’ productivity, you can determine what slows them down, why they burn out and how to solve inefficiencies. Technician burnout affects MSPs’ productivity and how they respond to clients, which can directly influence your clients’ service experience and satisfaction. Based on interviews with hundreds of MSPs, I’ve identified five common reasons why technicians burn out and decrease their productivity:
- Lack of standardization.
- Unclear documentation.
- Inefficient ticket management.
- Deficiencies across training and skills.
- Poor communication.
Addressing the underlying problems that cause technicians to feel discouraged and overwhelmed is critical to your services’ performance and overall productivity.
5 ways to improve efficiency across your team
The challenge with solving inefficiencies is that it takes persistence. Most MSPs are working on these inefficiencies to a certain degree, but as businesses grow, processes break down, procedures become outdated and staff change. Here are five ways you can remedy productivity blockers:
- Standardize and re-standardize
Whether you are reducing the number of custom agreements, unifying the technology stack or defining the escalation process, standardization is the go-to strategy. It is far easier to proactively determine these activities before things go awry, which helps eliminate confusion between your clients and techs. Additionally, it is essential to re-standardize these processes regularly because tools, people and infrastructure tend to change over the years.
- Document everything
Every recurring activity needs to be documented. Keeping a track record of what happens is handy when one technician hands off a client or ticket to another, especially if the latter is a newcomer.
Furthermore, people are prone to making mistakes. That is just a part of human nature. Documenting procedures is crucial to preventing human error when those procedures are clear and accessible to your team. Although many MSPs are excellent notetakers, they often lack a documentation management system. Even worse, technicians who use outdated procedures can misguide activities and generate more problems.
- Enhance ticket management
From my experience speaking to Acronis partners, I’ve learned that many technicians take a self-sufficient approach and memorize how they solve most common problems. They do not go to great lengths to record their steps to resolve tickets. Sadly, this is a bit of a missed opportunity. Consider this: Most clients want to find a solution on their own, and self-service client knowledge bases and portals can minimize technician fatigue by reducing time spent on creating tickets. However, many MSPs overlook the advantages of creating ticket templates that help curb human-related errors and time spent making requests.
Automation is valuable for ticket creation, routing and prioritization. Of course, you want to implement basic rules to ensure that the right technician handles each ticket. With automation, you can simplify ticketing routing with rules that assign tasks based on SLA requirements or issue severity.
Another helpful practice is ticket tracking. You need to measure each technician’s success and know how much time they spend resolving issues. This is the only way to forecast your productivity in the future. It also reveals which technicians need more training and support, so you can reassign tasks based on their abilities.
- Train, educate and incentivize
Most people struggle to learn a new skill on their own when they don’t have the time and incentives to do it. However, incentivizing learning is one of the best ways to motivate teams to grow. Consider allocating time for training, conducting regular exams and performing check-ins. Offering free training subscriptions is one of the most effective incentives to kick-start education. It will amaze you how much your team will learn if given the opportunity to reach their fullest potential.
Another best practice is to set up mentoring and shadowing programs where senior technicians can help junior technicians learn the ropes. You can empower inexperienced techs to improve their performance if they have a mentor who can teach them. After all, we can all remember a mentor who took the time to help us at one point in our careers.
- Communicate clearly and efficiently
On a given day, you probably use Slack, WhatsApp, Teams, Zoom, email and text to exchange messages between each other and clients — and end up wasting a lot of time switching between platforms and looking for old messages.
Technicians are already juggling too many of these tools. Communication procedures are fundamental to improving their efficiency. Reducing the number of communication apps that technicians use will immediately alleviate their load, and using one platform for all internal communication and implementing procedures can help streamline how technicians reach out to clients and one another. Simple channel tagging for specific situations can help organize messages and improve interactions.
The value of measurable success
Enhancing productivity requires perseverance and commitment. However, assessing your team’s productivity is about identifying what is going wrong and what is going right. By measuring your technicians’ success, you can also report to clients on the impact your services have. It is very valuable to show clients tangible results with performance metrics such as the number of issues your technicians resolved and the length of time it took them to help.
