How MSPs can gain a competitive edge with automations

It’s been quite a year for MSPs and IT service providers. Across the country, work volume increased rapidly in the early days of the pandemic, with businesses scrambling to enable remote operations and set up employees to work from home.

As the year progresses, many MSPs are considering how to work more efficiently and effectively to meet customer demand while combatting pandemic-related challenges. They are now looking for ways to improve workload management, maximize revenue and gain a competitive edge.

Common Challenges for MSPs

The three most common challenges we hear MSPs face are delivering great service and solutions to retain their customer base in a highly competitive marketplace, maintaining profitability at a time when margins are shrinking, and gaining new customers. Service providers need to offer the right technology and solutions to customers exactly when they are needed, or they risk having the customer look elsewhere for help. If they aren’t prepared for incoming requests and don’t have insight into what the customer’s environment looks like, it opens up gaps in service as they have to spend more time and resources to uncover, troubleshoot and resolve issues that emerge. Other common challenges include avoiding burnout from overworked staff and avoiding over-reliance on a single expert who performs important tasks for customers that are not easy to scale. In the current market environment, these challenges have become more important to overcome as they can impact profitability.

The Power of Automation: Doing More with Less

Many MSPs find they are trying to figure out how to do more with the same or less resources. Quite simply, they must figure out how to find more time. When adding more people isn’t an option, adding automation tools can be the answer. Automation can alleviate some of the pressure on IT teams and make it easier for them to achieve their top business objectives. MSPs can create automations that turn complex, resource-intensive manual processes into simple, easily repeatable processes. Automated tasks can also be scheduled to run monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly, with results automatically delivered into the inbox of stakeholders. Cutting down on costly, labor-intensive work means valuable employee time can be devoted to other important tasks.

Prime Scenarios for Automation

Automations are an ideal solution in areas where repetitive tasks are required to produce an outcome. MSPs might have a standard process they execute with a few customers on a regular basis, but they don’t have the internal resources to offer the process to other customers. Automation allows them to streamline and distribute the task across the organization to produce the same outcome at scale. Some common scenarios for competitive tasks include running reports and assessments on Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Microsoft Exchange and Azure.

Anywhere there is a single point of failure or a single specialist who maintains the knowledge for an important procedure, automation should be considered. Capturing what the operating procedure is and automating it, if applicable, can be helpful. This enables others in the organization to perform the procedure easily with the click of a button. It also minimizes risk and can safeguard against interruptions in service when the specialist is away on vacation.

How Automations Help MSPs Compete

Automation can help MSPs deliver exceptional value to their customers and maintain an edge over the competition by simplifying critical yet complex processes. For example, a partner that specializes in security had a detailed, 85-step process for security assessments that required 12-13 hours for a solutions architect to complete, using a combination of scripts and other resources to produce their desired outcome.

Partners can also set up scheduled recurrence of Teams assessments, for example, and connect them directly into their customers’ Teams environment for real-time visibility. This provides a valuable service to help customers better manage their IT resources. MSPs can also set up regular assessments to give customers insight and deliver proactive suggestions that build credibility and make them a valuable partner to the company. This might include offering insight to help the customer take full advantage of the technology they already have or highlighting gaps in their current technology, which could provide an upsell or cross-sell opportunity.

While new challenges have emerged in the current economic climate, solutions are available to help MSPs work more efficiently, generate new revenue, and maintain or improve profitability. By employing automation in their workflows, MSPs can keep their business running at peak performance.

Willie Cash is the General Manager of Voleer Americas at BitTitan, where he works with SMB and enterprise partner companies to identify and implement effective ways to drive solutions, grow revenue, and increase profits in their day-to-day businesses. Learn more about Voleer here.