However, companies don’t measure their documentation efforts very often. This leads to zero visibility, making it harder to get buy-in from techs, manage the overall process and build a productive documentation culture. So, how do you fix this? By identifying documentation KPIs, making them part of your documentation plan and linking them to your business outcomes. Let’s dive a bit deeper into this, shall we?

Documentation KPIs You Should Be Measuring

We have identified four simple KPIs that you should be measuring — Documents Created, Documents Updated, Documents Viewed and Documents Deleted. These KPIs will give you an overall picture of your organization’s documentation maturity and motivate your team to work on and use documentation.

Documents Created

This KPI measures the total number of new documents added to IT Glue by an employee in a given time frame. Assessing this should help you understand what percentage of your clients’ environments are documented, optimize the documentation workflow, determine the impact of automation and if the documentation workload is distributed equally.

Documents Updated

This KPI tracks the number of documents that were modified or updated by an employee in a given time frame. As SOPs, end-user information and credentials are updated frequently, and your team must keep the respective documents up to date. That’s precisely where this KPI comes in handy. You can track whether your employees are weeding out outdated information and pull up those who are not taking documentation hygiene seriously.

Documents Viewed

This documentation metric counts the total number of documents viewed by an employee in a particular timescale. It gives you insight into — how often your staff refers to documentation, how it impacts their response/troubleshooting time, what type of documents are viewed more, and who is using documentation more and who is not.

Documents Deleted

This metric gives you a count of the overall number of documents that an employee removed from IT Glue during a particular time frame. To maintain documentation hygiene, outdated documents and lapsed client information must be removed promptly. Otherwise, it may lead to clutter and errors and could slow down your team. This KPI should help you keep that in check.

Wrapping Up

The next question is, how do you measure these KPIs? You can measure each of these using the IT Glue-CrewHu integration. Moreover, it lets you score your employees based on these KPIs and run contests to recognize and reward the top performers.

Once you start using these KPIs and tying them to business outcomes, the next step is to set benchmarks. Consider your documentation objectives and your clients’ IT environment while setting these benchmarks. This way, you will be able to measure your efforts, optimize them and predict the future.

Want to learn more about how to use the IT Glue-CrewHu integration to measure your documentation efforts? Sign up for our upcoming webinar.

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The post Using KPIs to Help You Grow appeared first on IT Glue.

Reality Check

The first quarter of 2020 has seen a more challenging macroeconomic environment than prior quarters. While the last half of 2019 saw 2.1% GDP growth in the US, Q1 2020 very well could fall short of that. The coronavirus has suppressed economic activity in many countries around the world, and nobody should be surprised if it happens everywhere else, too.

Still Big Opportunity

While SMBs might be tempted to curtail IT spending due to economic uncertainty, the need for investment in cybersecurity, backup and recovery, and compliance is actually increasing. This is absolutely NOT the time for a small business to spend less on these critical IT functions. Ransomware attacks continue at a rapid pace, and new compliance laws like CCPA and the New York Privacy Act (which will likely pass) raise the compliance stakes significantly for SMBs.

For MSPs, of course, this means opportunity. Leading vendors are upping their security, compliance and backup offerings, and quite frankly these should be standard for any MSP. IT Glue’s most recent Global MSP Benchmark Survey identified these offerings as the most important opportunities in the channel today.

Term Matters

So, what happens if the economy really does start to falter? This is why you should get your clients on term, and yourself as well. Term contracts mean cost and revenue certainty. Your clients might talk about delaying hardware upgrades, but the fundamentals like monitoring, upgrades, service desk, security, compliance and backup should not be subject to delayed spending. If your clients are on term contracts, that monthly revenue is locked in.

This same principle applies to your costs as well. When you know how much you’re going to spend each month you have more control over your margins. Fluctuations in the business cycle are less likely to represent an existential threat to your business.

A Few Final Thoughts

You’ve got targets for revenue growth and cost containment. If you’re not yet meeting your revenue targets, look to the revenue streams that aren’t going to be adversely affected by the business cycle. On the cost side, keep thinking of ways to save money. Unemployment is still very low – 3.6% overall in the US, and much lower for tech talent. So you will need to get the most out of your team. Give them the tools they need to be more efficient, so that you can contain labor and operating costs. Yes, sometimes you have to spend money to make money, but saving money in the long run is exactly how you handle economic uncertainty, and meet your strategic objectives regardless of overarching economic conditions.

IT Glue is one of those investments that helps you save money, and these savings are achieved almost immediately. As if that weren’t enough, we can also offer security, compliance and backup products from our partners that will help you generate revenue by tapping into IT spend growth areas.

So take a quick look at our demo as a starting point, and get your MSP on track for the 2020 you envisioned at the start of the year.

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The post Q1 Check-In: How’s Your 2020 Performance Stacking Up? appeared first on IT Glue.

Frame the Conversation

A lot of MSPs get caught up in playing the price game. Sales calls focus on price in part because that’s often what the prospect wants to talk about. So why do they want to talk about price? Because they don’t know all that much about IT. They might know what their present IT provider or in-house department does, but they don’t necessarily know what an IT department can do for their business.

Simply put, a conversation focused on price is a conversation of the ill-informed. The prospect wants to talk about price because they think all IT providers are more or less the same. If your stack looks a lot like what your competitors offer, then it’s easy to understand why the prospect thinks that way. Don’t expect a prospect to be well-informed. Informing them is your job.

The SLA as Differentiator

There will be overlap in terms of stack. Especially when targeting specific verticals. The best tech is the best tech, and quite frankly you shouldn’t expect to be the only company to figure that out. So what differentiates you? Process. And process is reflected in your SLA. What you promise to a prospect in terms of service is the most sure-fire way to differentiate yourself, and shift the conversation away from what you are going to cost them to what you are going to offer them.

The SLA Reflects your Processes

Any fool can promise perfect customer service. What you say doesn’t matter. What you show, that’s what matters. When you start talking about the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you offer as part of your service level agreement, show the client how you will deliver. Show them that your processes are documented. Show them results you’ve achieved for other clients.

The Role of Documentation

Best-in-class MSPs know that talk is cheap, so they will literally show prospects the process documentation that they use. That way, you’re not just saying “we promise to solve this problem in x minutes”, you’re saying “this is how we’ll solve this problem in x minutes. And here’s some more documentation that shows that, on average, we’ve actually done it eight minutes faster over the past six months.”

Weaponize your SLAs

If you promise superior performance metrics as part of your service level agreements, and then back that up with documentation on your processes and your track record, then you’re going to have an advantage over all but the toughest competitors. And best of all, you won’t be talking about lowering your prices anymore.

Learn more about IT Glue

IT Glue is a documentation platform for MSPs, designed to eliminate waste, improve productivity and help you hit your SLAs better. Document your sales processes and customer personas in IT Glue, and integrate it with your PSA to enhance your marketing and sales functions.

The post Weaponize Your SLAs appeared first on IT Glue.

If you are a mature Managed IT Service Provider (MSP) a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a key metric to measure. Why? An SLA commits your business to an acceptable level of service to your clients.

Few things drive a client crazier than submitting a ticket and having it disappear into a black hole. Non-responsive or ad hoc support are short roads to dissatisfied clients. Agreed upon SLAs helps frame expectations and communication helps manage these expectations. Once you have SLAs in place you are also in a position to work towards consistently exceeding them in order to wow your clients with world-class service.

Why are SLAs important to your customers?

An SLA is typically written into the contract, and in some cases, the contract may have a cost claw back. In the IT service space, this is often not the case because of the general unpredictable and limited control that the service provider has in dealing with another company’s infrastructure. Regardless, the SLA is a contractual obligation and repeated breach of this agreement is cause for termination of the agreement.

The importance of having an SLA is to have the client and provider agree on what the expected turnaround times for support should be. Typically this is:

• 8hrs for most support issues
• 4hrs for urgent issues
• 1hr for emergency issues

Once defined it is important that the SLAs are communicated to the primary client contacts as well as the users. This leveling of expectations can curb issues where someone submits a ticket and 1 hour later goes storming off to their boss’s office when it hasn’t been fixed yet.

Never make your customer wait!

As an IT provider, managed or not, you are a service organization first and a technology company second.

How long a person waits for service is a very tangible measure of the quality of service a person receives. Think of all the places that are notorious for poor services, the DMV, Call-Centers, food service. “We’ve waited 15 minutes and no one has come to the table.” “I’m number 214. They are currently seeing number 167.” “We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes.” I have a question, when are they not experiencing higher than normal call volumes? The theme is the same, people hate waiting. People especially hate waiting when they have no feedback to manage their expectations.

Communication is critical to effectively managing expectations around SLAs. If you are a ConnectWise user, Brightgauge has a great visual guide on setting up SLAs, and provides a great monitor of SLA performance.

Always work to overachieve on your SLAs

• World-class IT service companies achieve SLA >90% of the time
• Average SLA achievement is 75%
• Underperforming companies are around 50% and below

With this as a reference, let’s explore strategies to help you overachieve in the eyes of the client.

1. Manage the psychological contract

If a user is upset about how long something took to get fixed, NEVER dismiss their concern saying, “This was completed within the SLA.” The SLA is only ever useful before a problem exists or in an after-action review.

Communication is the key to managing the psychological contract with the user. Acknowledging a support request with an auto-responder does little to dampen the client’s concern, it only acknowledges that an email or ticket submission was received. Auto-responders should not be used as a measure of response time.

Direct contact is a far better measure. It may look something like this, “Hi Jane, I understand from your ticket that you’re having trouble opening an attachment. I’ve scheduled a tech to review your request and you should hear back from them in 2 hours.” You’ve now acknowledged the issue and scheduled time for follow up. This allows the user to expect when they will hear from someone.

The trick to this is maintaining that expectation and following through with the communication. Regular updates will buy you grace from the user, but not indefinitely. One of the best ways to manage this accountability to tickets is a dispatcher. Someone that can focus on juggling support requests, who those requests get delegated to and assisting with client communication.

2. Repeatable process

First call resolution is the best way to streamline your techs time and your clients time. The most powerful way to manage this is with well-structured documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Most of the issues that techs face are not some rare event that no one has ever seen before. In fact, most support issues are recurrences of a previous issue. Having a clean and easy to navigate documentation system like IT Glue drastically reduces the burden on techs of searching for the information.

SOPs act as a script for resolving typical issues or executing procedures. So rather than each tech re-inventing the wheel for each problem, a repository of information exists for them to reference. This is especially important in:

• System builds (server/laptop/desktop)
• Application installation
• User creation/decommission

These procedures get done a lot and have detailed requirements. Just allowing staff to wing it on each one will inevitably lead to error, which increases the time required through re-work or escalation. Missing details from an SOP can also create a poor perception with a client. “You guys have done this dozen of times. How come you get it wrong so often?”

Distill the knowledge from your team’s experience into SOPs. This will reduce the time spent looking for a solution and therefore the resolve that issue.

3. Escalation path

A defined escalation process is important to ensure someone doesn’t end up burning a bunch of time on an issue that might be out of their capability. Staff should know how long they should spend on an issue before asking for help or passing the issue up to the next support tier.

Great team members will often hold a high degree of personal accountability for the issues that they are given. They truly want to be able to solve the problem and help the client.

The dispatcher also plays a support role in keeping the team accountable to the escalation times and ensuring communication to the client. The service manager should be reviewing the tickets that miss the SLA and determine if there is an opportunity to update or create an SOP that would make that type of ticket easier in the future.

4. Low costs, high value

Some issues will require escalation, but a focused effort on reducing the number of escalations is important to drive up your “first call resolution” numbers. This strategy will facilitate hiring more entry-level (tier 1) technicians.

Here are the costs to demonstrate why this is important:

• Tier 3s cost $75,000 – $80,000 a year. They tend to deal with complex issues and thus close fewer tickets in a day, say 5-8 tickets
• Tier 1s cost $35,000 – $40,000 a year. They should be closing 15-20 tickets a day

Therefore: 2 x Tier 1 techs who cost no more than $80,000 = 40 Tickets per day. This means the tier 1 approach is guaranteed to drive better results and help achieve your SLA goals.

Clean and logical documentation is critical to ensure the tier 1 technicians are being set up for success. It starts with team member onboarding. One of the reasons more seasoned technicians can resolve issues is that they know where to look. A good documentation system will ensure techs have a clear view of the client environment, assets, dependencies, and other related information. There are a number of options available such as Dropbox, Google Drive, using your RMM or PSA, or IT Glue.

The on-ramp time for new people that have access to the collective knowledge of the team will also be dramatically higher. This is preferable to new folks having to rely on a steady drip of experience with each environment.

Finally, since the team knowledge is captured,  the tier 1s are more likely to be able to close issues on the first call. These quick closes mean SLAs are exceeded, clients are happy that they don’t have to wait and high-performance team members feel the success of blasting through issues while getting high-quality feedback scores on their work.

To find out how IT Glue can help you master your documentation and hit your SLAs with ease, sign up for a demo or get in touch with your Account Manager.

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IT Glue is a proven, best practices-driven IT documentation platform packed with features designed to help you maximize the efficiency, transparency and consistency of your team. With so much of your business productivity lost each day in search of vital information, let IT Glue secure this information and start Freeing Minds.

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