If you’re an MSP and you’re not providing 24x7x365 IT support, you’re cheating your clients out of services they really need to keep their businesses afloat and stay productive.
Still, many MSPs only offer 9am-5pm Monday-Friday coverage over round-the-clock managed IT services. Why? More often than not, MSPs favor extending the support window, but simply don’t have the bandwidth or internal resources needed. Rather than stretch yourself and your technicians thin, you’re forced into only providing coverage during normal week day business hours.
But IT demands are constant and ongoing. They don’t follow a set schedule. By not offering 24x7x365 IT support, how will you handle workstations in multiple time zones? What will prevent your clients from seeking the peace of mind afforded by your competitors who safeguard their networks during all hours of the day? Most importantly, how can you truly differentiate your services from those of break/fix providers? You offer managed IT services because you understand the value of proactive IT. Are you not, however, stuck in reactive mode when issues arise during after hours and your team is forced to play catch-up the next day?
Why Move to 24x7x365 Coverage (And How You Can Do It)
Providing 24/7 support isn’t that big of a leap, yet many MSPs refuse to transition to a fully-managed 24/7 IT solution because of staffing restrictions and overhead costs. Before I discuss how to get around these barriers, consider costlier problems that can emerge during gaps in your coverage. Downtime, loss of productivity, and lack of readiness can snakebite your client if an outage occurs over the weekend and isn’t identified or acknowledged until Monday morning. Not only that, factor in the additional time your team might waste scrambling to detect and troubleshoot the root issue after it has already snowballed into a larger, more pressing concern that’s directly impeding client productivity. Worse yet, you also run the risk of potentially losing a client if you’re not responsive enough (or at all) in emergency situations. You may not be offering 24x7x365 IT management, but someone else is.
So you know providing round-the-clock support can cut costs and increase client satisfaction, but how do you know how to grow your scope of services without adding headcount and exhausting resources? Managed IT services providers can easily leverage a 24x7x365 IT help desk solution, allowing you to offer continuous, white-labeled support for your clients, day or night. For a fixed monthly cost, these highly certified technicians can field low level customer requests—like password resets—in the name of your business, delivering unparalleled customer service to satisfied clients.
Furthermore, with a proper remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform in place, you can receive the remediation steps, alert notification, and fully-managed support needed to assure your clients that they are protected from unplanned downtime and service disruptions.
In relying on Pro-Active Managed IT’s IT management platform, we are able to identify and remediate problems before they hit a client’s network the next morning. Integrated with our intelligent RMM technology, their Network Operations Center (NOC) also provides critical event monitoring and notification, as well as remediation on items we call “Tier 1” problems. Also, by allowing our RMM agents to run on supported workstations and servers all day and night, pre-built scripts can help us kick off a work flow or solve a problem without even lifting a finger.
How has this helped us grow and scale our MSP business? We’ve found that when we offer 24/7 support to all of our customers (not just the ones that stay open 24/7), we strengthen our client relationships and are able to improve retention rates exponentially. In demonstrating that we are able to identify and solve problems all day every day, our clients tell us they feel so much better knowing they have someone they trust in their corner at all times.
Author: Jaq Baldwin, Contiuum