Three Really Easy Ways to Reduce the Costs of Supporting Your MSP Clients

The fundamental tenet of offering Managed IT Services is, in my opinion, efficiency. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP) serving small businesses, you are going to be creating an offering at a price that is attractive to clients, but is profitable for you.

I see many growing MSP’s who have the first part of this equation down pat, and are winning clients hand over fist, but really struggle with the second part of the equation - remaining profitable. Without profit, your business won’t get anywhere quickly - in fact, you’ll be lucky to stay afloat at all.

Profitability in Managed Services can often be boiled down to the amount of time your engineers spend servicing client problems. If your engineers are wasting inordinate amounts of time dealing with client support requests, then you’re going to make less profit from your Managed Service agreements.

With that in mind, here are three simple steps that you can immediately take to help your engineers reduce the cost of supporting your clients.

Create a Support Folder

Firstly, ensure each client has a plastic wallet or folder where all their printed licenses, software and hardware manuals and installation CD’s are stored. Mark this folder as “IT only” and place it safely within the Comms Cabinet or Comms room safely away from the inquisitive fingers of end-users.

Ensure your engineers know that if they install any new equipment or software that comes with manuals or installation CD’s, these items are appropriately marked up with identifiers (to stop you ending up with 20 identical Windows 7 CD’s and licenses) and are then stored away in the support folder. They are not left with the end-user to lose.

Next, on each clients file server, create a file folder. Call it “IT”, “@Support” or “!Tech”. Whatever you call it, make this naming standard uniform across all your clients.

Within this folder, create three sub folders. “Utilities”, “Drivers” and “Software Installs”.

Populate the Utilities folders with your recommended support tools - ZIP software (I recommend 7ZIP), Malware Scanners (such as MalwareBytes or HiJackThis!), ISO Burners, Memory Checkers and so on. Any tools that your engineers routinely and commonly use to service clients. The next time your engineer needs one of these tools, he’ll be able to find it easily - cutting down on any wasted time and effort searching for them.

In the Drivers folder encourage your engineers to drop any system specific drivers for workstations or servers they work on. Remember those installation CD’s from earlier? They should be copied into this folder. That means even if, for whatever reason, the installation CD gets lost - you still have the software drivers to hand when they need re-installing.

The same goes for the Software Installs folder. Copy installation files from CD’s across, or create .ISO images and drop them in the Software Installs folder. CD’s get lost. Electronic copies can be backed up and secured much more easily.

Capture Documentation

If an engineer installs a new PC, he makes a note of the Make/Model, Serial Number and Windows CD-Key. This info is stored centrally within your PSA or Helpdesk system.

If an engineer installs a new piece of commercial software, she makes a note of the license key used and stores it centrally within your PSA or Helpdesk system. Likewise,  if they install new printer or plotter, they make a note of the Make/Model and Serial Number. This info is stored centrally within your PSA or Helpdesk system.

Whatever the equipment or software, capture as much documentation about it as possible. It will save you hours of time trying to ascertain those same details in the future.

Label Everything

Ensure each of your engineers has a label printer. Ask them to firstly label their label printer with their own name. The label printer is now theirs, and they are responsible for it.

Every time your engineer touches a computer, server, printer, laptop, power cable, UPS, router or switch at a client site, they should label it.

For computers, label with the workstation name. This helps end-users quickly identify PC’s when they next require remote support over the telephone.

For servers, label with the server name and static IP address(es). This enables you to quickly talk end-users through powering off the correct equipment over a telephone.

For printers, label with the server queue name and static IP address. This enables you to quickly establish which printer the user says doesn’t work rather than “the printer in the corner.”

For Routers and Switches, label with the internal and/or external IP address(es). Label with the default gateway. This enables your engineers to quickly do ping and TraceRoute checks when there are connectivity problems.

For power cables, label with what the power cable is powering. If it’s a printer, label that cable with the printer name. If it’s a desktop, label with the desktop name. If it’s a monitor, label it as a monitor. The next time your engineer needs to find a power socket in a hurry, he can choose to yank a monitor cable rather than accidentally power down somebodies PC and risk corrupting it.

Labeling everything might seem like a time consuming chore. But it demonstrates to the client you’re in control of their infrastructure, and it allows you to quickly and accurately find the right equipment when you need to.

Conclusion

Here I’ve shared three easy steps that are painless, and help you reduce the time and cost of supporting your clients. They may not seem very radical ideas, but they all save minutes here and there.

As your Managed Service Provider business grows, all those minutes here and there soon add up and can make the difference between being profitable and unprofitable.