Seriously - if you are worried about ruining your existing setup, get another trial on another email address and spend some *real* time to learn what it does.
He's been with us for years - he just has tried to avoid spending a lot of time on business process improvement
@marley1 I'd rather do this on the forum than a phone call if that's ok - I'm in Prague for 2 months with part of the team
1 - Multiple Streams of Client Communication - Direct email to us, email to support@ (not tied into RepairShopR), text message, smoke signals, etc.
A lot of threads cover this - I think it's a normal evolution of a consultant when you go from being a one-man-show to having a team, your clients will need heavy training. There isn't a tool that exists to just grab all communication channels and funnel them properly.
Here are some quick ideas;
- Setup "Create a Ticket" links on your customers desktops, Intranet, etc
- Have a meeting with each client and let them know you are growing and have a team now, and your team is going to handle triage of all support requests. This means emailing your helpdesk email will be FASTER than texting you on your personal cell phone because it will bypass your phone as the bottleneck
- Remind clients every time they write you directly; "Hey, I got this email - I'm going to forward it to our support@ourdomain.com so my team can get it as a trouble ticket - thanks!"
- Tie your support@ email to RepairShopr and figure out if you want tickets automatically, or just Leads
- Put your "low person on the totem pole" in charge of "Ticket Triage" in your org - this means it's one of their primary roles to handle all misc inbound communication and get the data structured. If someone calls, they make a ticket - if you forward an email to them, they make a ticket - if a client writes a blank subject email, they clean it up. Someone needs to make the data coming IN good, or you won't have anything to work with
- In my MSP shop this person was also required to make sure every ticket had some time tracked on it, 1 minute if it was a bunk ticket, 15 min minimum if it was real work, etc
2 - Prioritizing Request - Break/Fix client calls, so does MSP client, well MSP should take priority
Totally, see my list above - you should put 1 and only one person in charge of triage, they need to own it and feel responsible for the data coming in - they can also prioritize. Our Triage person was REQUIRED to send a message to the client within the first 15 minutes saying one of these messages:
"Hey, we got your ticket - it looks this isn't super urgent so we'll get a tech to look at this by the end of the day. Let me know if I miss-interpreted!"
"Hey, we got it - this looks urgent, I'll have an engineer on it in the next few minutes"
"Hey, this looks pretty urgent but we are all tied up at the moment - I'll get an engineer on this within the hour. Updates to come"
Etc etc
Clients LOVED us when this started, before this we got complaints every week about "slow responses" even to low pri stuff.
In our shop we told clients every request must be a ticket once we thought calls were getting out of control. If someone called we would ask if they had a ticket open, if not - we'd make a ticket for them on the phone. If it was low pri we would ask them if we could schedule it for later - even pushing back a few hours gives you breathing room and conveys to them there is a priority system.
This gives you enough buffer to easily prioritize the MSP call over a break fix - and gives you an opportunity to get off the phone in a hurry while still being easily reachable on the phone and providing great customer service.
3 - Ticket Creation - Creating tickets in RepairShopR from mobile phone or email is annoying. I would like to be able to receive an email personally and then forward to repairshopr and simply put in the subject @clientsdomain.com so it gets linked to the account
Great point - our forwarding system has been pretty bad. You could put "from:foo@foo.com" in the email subject to make the lead/ticket have the right contact on it, but that's not fun to type from a phone. I'm going to improve the forwarding detection and try to make this automatic - give me a couple days to tweak it and experiment.
4 - Tickets have to be assigned to a tech. Often the client cares less who fixes the issue just wants it resolved. It would be great for any tech to work on it and then take owning and work on. Other techs should see these assigned techs and work on them if warning of over time limit or something
One idea that worked for us - treat the assignment like a soft "I got it" flag - but not authoritative. If you are working on something, feel free to claim it by assigning to yourself. If you see a ticket that's been sitting assigned to someone, ping them in slack or just grab it from them. If you are in an office together and in slack - that's what this office and slack are for. Holler to the person next to you, "You on this ticket for So and So?".
Everyone should be looking at ALL OPEN TICKETS - ALL THE TIME. Not just theirs. Maybe you as the CEO default to only looking at your own tickets some day, but while you are working on these processes - everyone should be watching all tickets while you get in a groove.
Do not make it so people only see their own tickets - too much slips through the cracks, gets ignored, etc.
Put the ticket dashboard up on a TV on the wall and tune it so it's useful for your setup - then you can point at things that turn red and be like "WAT?"
4 - Keeping techs ontop of tickets so they dont get lost.
Hopefully something like the dashboard with the color codes can do that.
We also tried instituting every ticket must have a comment every day, which can drive the color coding in the ticket dashboard.
Re-iterate that assigning is a soft checkout, not full ownership - people should help eachother and keep eachother out of trouble with the client. It's you guys against the clock working to keep client happy.
I feel like this is the exact same advice I would give if you used any ticket system, not just RepairShopr. My MSP shop didn't have RepairShopr - we used Kaseya ticketing - works just the same. Had assignment that worked just the same. (One person can be assigned, not multiple)
Would love to talk more about any of these in detail - #shootmedown
