When was the last time your technician complained about spending hours on backup?
Mundane, repetitive tasks prevent MSPs from scaling and expanding their business. Automating processes can boost productivity and free up time for the team to focus on revenue-generating activities and drive more profitability. From deployment, management, monitoring to updating, billing, and helpdesk – opportunities for MSP automation are abundant, especially in the cloud with several SaaS and PaaS offerings.
This blog will discuss how to simplify IT management with process automation for greater profitability.
Automate your internal processes
For most MSPs, maintenance tasks, such as software updates and patches, regular disk cleanup, and frequent backups, are the most repetitive and time-consuming processes. These maintenance tasks are tedious, yet crucial to your IT service offerings. Just think what would happen if a malware infection gets through when you don’t implement backup properly.
Moving from on-premises servers to the cloud, you can automate many of those frequent, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks. For example, Automatic Maintenance by Microsoft enables users to be in control of maintenance activity scheduling and configuration. By reducing errors and boosting efficiency, automation helps to lower your operational costs
Another candidate for automation is the deployment of a new solution. In the past, you would have to go through the tedious provisioning process for every single new customer, spending hours, days, or even weeks to build a new environment, migrate existing applications, and integrate required services.
With automation, you can drastically reduce the deployment time to minutes. The ability to efficiently handle processes that span tools, systems, and department silos gives enormous cost savings for MSPs regarding reduced technician time and expedited time to market.
You can leverage existing scripts and workflows or create your own. Public cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or AWS make it easy by putting samples, utilities, and scenario runbooks at your fingertips so that you can get up and running quickly with your automation tasks.
Automate client-facing functions
While automation can improve operational efficiency, it also offers significant benefits in various client-facing services. It is vital that MSPs cultivate close relationships with their customers to ensure a steady stream of recurring revenue.
To increase customer satisfaction, you can use automation in services such as billing, reporting, and ticketing. If you only provide reports upon request or manually handle and assign support tickets, it’s time to revamp this post sales engine to serve your customers more efficiently.
Bills and reports should be generated and delivered automatically on a regular basis. Tickets should be quickly routed to the appropriate technician, ensuring faster resolution of the issue and boosting customer satisfaction. These extra efforts will reinforce the value you provide and keep the benefits of using your IT services top of mind for clients.
Adopt automation to deliver proactive services
Adding automation tools also enables you to start providing more proactive services.
Automated monitoring and management allows you to perform a variety of diagnostic and preventative maintenance routines with real-time alerts. Ensure potential bottlenecks are identified before they become major problems. Combined with an automated ticketing system, you can immediately generate tickets when specific alerts are detected.
This level of automation will boost customer satisfaction and loyalty because you are taking an extra step to ensure their service is up and running at all times. High customer satisfaction leads to higher retention rate and possible referral opportunities in the future.
Moreover, automation for proactive services can significantly cut costs by preventing issues from escalating into tickets that will consume valuable technician time. As the result, you can increase service quality while reducing the time spent supporting clients and fixing issues.
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Tags: Managed Service Provider
