How Can You Better Manage Your Service Team?

 For Managed Service Providers (MSPs), the ability to manage service tickets helps keep workflows efficient.

In addition, an effective service management team includes service technicians who understand how to handle service tickets and ensure that customers receive fast and reliable support for service issues.

However, implementing an effective service management team can seem particularly difficult, especially for MSPs who need to manage many tasks simultaneously.

So how can you better Managed IT Service team? Here are three tips you can take to build an effective service management team every day.

1. Establish A Standard Ticket Process.

Standardization often plays an important role in service management.

Introducing the proper ticketing process will also extend service management so that your service team can consistently address all of your customer needs.

"Service providers cannot afford to have different service models for different customers. CA Technologies (CA), an IT management software company, wrote in a whitepaper:

CA Technologies recommends a "build style approach" to service delivery and support.

Using this approach, instead of designing and implementing a ticket process from scratch for each customer, as the CA team points out, you can establish a practice-based ticket process for your service team.

“The growing MSP is leveraging 'reusable parts', such as a formal service catalog and well-defined, reproducible processes, to shift to a manufacturing style approach to service delivery and support. We have to do that, ”said CA Technologies. "When a service provider establishes a process based on best practices rather than creating a service from scratch for each customer, it has a significant set of benefits."

2. Hold The Service Team Accountable.

Your service team should include experts who can respond to customer concerns and questions without delay.

Each member of this team must take ownership of the service ticket and work with you to ensure that the service issue is fully resolved.

 

John Mehrmann, CEO of Brainhunter, a network of operator management tools, said service technicians should respond to customer inquiries as much as possible and work with them to resolve service issues.

Additionally, fostering good service ensures that the service team can always provide the best possible support.

For example, customer satisfaction software provider Client Heartbeat noted that boosting 15% to 45% of service technician salaries can have far-reaching consequences for the company and its customers.

According to Client Heartbeat, using incentives increases service technician accountability for behavior and enables service teams to achieve the best results every day.

3. Use the "Customer Response" metric.

Does your company use the "Customer Response" metric when evaluating the response of the service team to customer tickets? Otherwise, you may be missing valuable data that you can use to improve your service levels.

Connect Intelligence, a provider of business intelligence (BI) dashboards, noted that MSP today is not enough to reach customers by phone or email.

Instead, these service providers must monitor "customer service" fees to ensure that all service requests are consistently met.

"It is important to mark all tickets that were updated by email or on the web portal as" Customer responses. " The way this exception works is that the flag is cleared only when the ticket is manually opened or unchecked. The workflow is activated and the status changes to "Customer Responded" unless it is a child ticket. This makes administration much easier, ”wrote ConnectSMART in a blog post.

Additionally, ConnectSMART proposes the implementation of a rule that requires service technicians to respond to all customer tickets before work is done.

According to ConnectSMART, service technicians don't want to go through a wide range of service tickets before closing time. Therefore, service technicians are likely to respond to customer tickets as soon as they receive these notifications, says ConnectSMART, helping MSPs improve customer satisfaction.

Take the time and resources you need to improve service management. This will allow you to better manage your service team and respond to service tickets quickly and efficiently.