"Between the technologies capabilities and the wider customer service experience and user group, once you understand and harness ConnectWise’s technical capabilities, you will love everything that the company offers and does"
RALPH LY, Senior Systems Engineer, Somerville
As market demand increases, process requirements intensify, and competition gets tougher, smart business leaders within MSPs investigate ways to increase their operational efficiencies, deliver a greater customer experience and build a more successful MSP practice.
While many MSPs implement best practices, processes and tools and ensure ongoing training and maintenance to optimise these, there are many other MSPs that get caught up in ‘business as usual’ activities and neglect key aspects of their business. MSPs can evolve organically without any awareness that changes are taking place, however, to ensure that MSPs are set up for success, more planned activity needs be undertaken to survive in a more competitive and demanding environment.
Getting more out of ConnectWise
Somerville had implemented ConnectWise solutions (ConnectWise Automate®, ConnectWise Manage®, ConnectWise Sell®, and BrightGauge®) several years back. Recently, they’ve undertaken a review of their existing application environment to see where they could find the opportunity to further deliver business efficiencies. It was identified that while they had the best applications for their needs, the applications were not being utilised and leveraged to their full capability.
‘Between the technologies capabilities and the wider customer service experience and user group, once you understand and harness ConnectWise’s technical capabilities, you will love everything that the company offers and does’ said Ralph Ly, Senior Systems Engineer, Somerville.
Applications like so many other aspects within an MSP, such as product offering, pricing, security, and customer experience should be reviewed yearly to ensure that they align to any changing market conditions and customer requirements. Simply setting and forgetting the applications you have can be detrimental to the business.
After reviewing the existing application environment, Somerville identified the opportunity to build an application business continuous improvement plan where focus was on ensuring that they were implementing the best technology and tools into their existing environment and that their existing environment was continually updated so as to deliver optimum business benefits. Only through leveraging the ConnectWise ecosystem could Somerville build and enhance their application environment to ensure that they were not only maximising our existing investment but were able to leverage further technologies to drive measurable operational efficiencies.
For Somerville to truly optimise their existing ConnectWise investment, focus was firstly on understanding how the existing team were using the applications. Once understood, time was allocated to developing processes and programs across a number of business processes to share knowledge on the true capabilities of the applications and demonstrate to the team what they could be doing to drive real productivity
While technology is an enabler, Somerville understands the importance of and undertook the following activities to help drive operational efficiencies, reduce operational costs, and increase the ROI of the initial investment:
- Provide workshops to educate users on what the applications can do
- Provide training to teach users how to best leverage the applications and help promote further adoption
- Save and update documentation communicating best practices and processes for future reference and training
- Promote the ConnectWise University to the onboarding and training of new employee
- Participate within the IT Nation Evolve peer groups and leverage peer-to-peer learning
To build a nimble, scalable, and modern business, Somerville believes that a cloud-first plan will allow them the opportunity to maximise their return on their technology investment. Somerville have received a number of key benefits in moving to the cloud, such as a reduction in cost in maintenance (managing server, database, backups, and updates) plus peace of mind that their security is always automatically up to date. There is also the time saving of approximately seven hours a month for a level three resource that were previously required to service and manage in-house hosted applications.
It’s all about the customer
Internal improvement not only helps drive innovation but the output from internal improvement can be used to help drive a greater customer experience. ConnectWise provides Somerville the ability to access data and information from across all customer interactions and existing technology configurations from across their customer’s business. This information can be accessed within seconds by a tech representative to then quickly answer any questions the customer may have at any point in time, no matter who is responding to the customer’s enquiry. This then allows Somerville to be able to better service and deliver a greater customer experience.
‘One of the biggest improvements that we have seen through better leveraging ConnectWise and its scripting ability has been the reduction in the number of tickets we are processing daily. Previously we were processing between 5,000 to 10,000 tickets a day. Now we are processing between 4,000 to 5,000 tickets. Not only has this provided cost savings but has helped reduce the number of customer complaints by over 50%,’ says Ralph.
Future planning
While MSPs invest time into reviewing their customer’s business and ensuring that they run as efficiently, effectively, and securely as possible, MSPs should take a step back to ensure that they an example of what they are preaching to their customers. With most time being allocated to business-as-usual activities within MSPs, it’s easy to oversee the importance of reviewing their existing technology. Once an MSP has the platform it requires that provides scalability, true integration between applications, security, and operational efficiencies, the next step is to ensure that processes and best practices are implemented to not only maximise the return on investment but to help deliver on the overall business objectives.
